Frank Stella at Houston's Menil Collection

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In the year 1958, 22-year-old Frank Stella (born 1936) graduated from Princeton, moved to Manhattan and set out to become an artist. It was a critical year of rapid growth, during which he moved from exuberant experimentation with monumental size, vivid color and bold stripes and brushwork to the taut, monochromatic “black paintings” at year’s end, pioneering works of Minimalism that would influence the course of American art.

Stella would go on to become one of the country’s most important postwar artists. Until now, however, the works of this crucial year have been either neglected or treated as a mere prelude to his later work.

“Frank Stella 1958” focuses closely on this year, tracking the young artist’s growth by presenting together for the first time 18 previously neglected paintings, a majority of the work he made during the year, thus allowing a thorough reevaluation of his early career.

The exhibition was organized by Megan R. Luke, doctoral candidate in the history of art and architecture at Harvard University, and Harry Cooper, curator of modern art at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum.

It is accompanied by a catalogue, published by Yale University Press, which provides an indispensable document of Stella’s early career, including scholarly essays by both curators that combine new archival research with bold reinterpretations of the work, according to the museum. The publication presents the entire series of paintings in color for the first time (with the exception of lost works known only through black-and-white photographs), situating them in relation to contemporaries such as Jasper Johns and Carl Andre (with whom Stella shared a studio space in 1958).