e. Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline).2 Fascinated with the idea of painting nothing more than stripes on a canvas, Stella would instigate the eruption of creating work that alluded to nothing beyond its literal presence and harbored no meaning beyond its material components and the facts of its construction. Of Stella's Black Paintings, the artist Carl Andre wrote that there was "nothing else- in his painting besides painted stripes.3 Here the infamous phrase was coined by Stella that, "What you see is what you see.""4 There was no transcendentalism involved whatsoever in his work, unlike the approach of Abstract Expressionist painters, such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. "What you see is what you see."" A black painting with stripes on it is what viewers saw, and that was exactly the reaction Stella sought from his viewers. This break from the passing Abstract Expressionism marked a new meaning for what could be classified as "art-. Viewing a three dimensional box on the floor of a gallery and discerning no alliteration or allusion from it other than that is merely a box is the type of idea that sprang from this evolutionary movement. Stella instigated this rightly so, and his infamous catch phrase would be manipulated by many artists emerging out of Minimalism.
Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts on May 12, 1936. An American painter and printmaker, Stella established himself early on in his career as an innovator rather than one who responded to innovations of others, and often confounded his peers. He suggested that his painting was significantly shaped by the fact that he was among the first generation of artists for whom the rightful existence of abstraction was assumed, and he maintained that it was the only post-war idiom capable of sustaining the highest ambitions for painting.
In 1950 Stella entered the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he studied art history and painting.
