NEW YORK— One of the most revered postwar American painters still working today, Frank Stella has reinvented himself in successive bodies of work throughout his five-decade career. Shortly after graduating from Princeton University in 1958, he moved to New York and began producing his history-making “black” paintings, which asserted the paintings’ material surface over the strain of painterly expressionism fashionable for most of the 1950s. Over the next decade he pursued a calculated flatness with several acclaimed series of brightly colored and rigorously geometric work, and by 1970, his painting had made him the youngest artist ever to receive a retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

But in the same year, while his early work was still influencing Minimalists the world over, he began to abandon insistent flatness in favor of three-dimensionality, turning from the canvas to a series of wall reliefs. By the late 1970s, the austere geometry of his proto-Minimalism had given way to elaborate and seemingly spontaneous constructions. These early forays into three-dimensional work eventually developed into freestanding sculpture, a practice that occupied Stella through most to the 1980s, and one that he continues today. Since the 1990s, he has also attempted several projects that apply the style of his sculpture to architectural spaces, proposing ambitious buildings with amorphous forms—in the vein of Frank Gehry—that have so far gone unbuilt.

Three exhibitions of Stella’s work opened in New York this spring, including a show of recent sculpture at Paul Kasmin Gallery, and two concurrent exhibitions at The Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture,” a retrospective spanning several years of his career, and “Frank Stella on the Roof,” which places several new sculptures in the dramatic setting of the museum’s rooftop sculpture garden. ArtInfo spoke with Stella shortly after all three exhibitions opened. Never one to engage in debates about his changing styles or reflect on the grand arc of his career, Stella nevertheless drew connections between his current output and his early groundbreaking work, and talked about reactions to his architectural projects.

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Frank, before you began working in three dimensions were you interested in architecture and architectural space?

I was brought up in Malden, Mass., and when I was very, very young, I went to classes at the H.H. Richardson-designed library there. It was this beautiful place with incredible split levels. I had an early sense of the stone and the weight—what I later found out to be Romanesque architecture. It was really brutal and good, and I loved it. I was very happy in that building.

When I was a student, I always loved Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier. Back then, when you studied in school, it was always art and architecture. Art was painting and sculpture, and it was also architecture. That’s what I was brought up on. I didn’t see them as different categories, just that architects liked to wear fancy clothes and not get their hands dirty.

You famously shared a studio with Richard Meier in the 1960s. Did he influence your work at the time?

I think a little bit. Richard was actually studying with my teacher from Princeton, Stephen Greene, who was at the New School, and we would see each other after Stephen’s class. We were very friendly, but it was very casual. We didn’t debate or anything like that. We weren’t really interested in theory. We were friends, and I was interested in what he was doing.

Do you think your work influenced him?

He was very interested in painting, but not just my painting. New York was alive with the best American postwar painters at the time—mostly Abstract Expressionist painting, but you forget that grouped in with the Abstract Expressionists were Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. It’s hard to think of them as Abstract Expressionists, but that’s what they were called.

Richard later worked on a synagogue—just a few years later really—with Newman, so he was very interested in what all the painters were doing.

Skipping ahead a decade or so, what were some of the strongest factors that led you to push your work into three dimensions during the 1970s?

The “Polish Villages” [the first wall reliefs] were the turning points, but it was implied in the irregular polygon [canvases] like Sunapee II (1966). I took that one a long way, and I really liked it, but it didn’t quite go anywhere.

But then I bounced back to it a few years later, and it came out with a whole new geometry. My paintings at the time started to be about organizing the space. I basically built a painting and then painted on it. That was essentially true from early on, when I was making the shape paintings, but it didn’t really sink in that much.   

From there, how did you go from constructing the space of a painting or wall relief to planning buildings and architecture?

Well, if you look at the maquettes of the “Polish Village” works, if you lay them flat on the tabletop, I think they could pass for architectural models—maybe [Daniel] Libeskinds or something like that. I always knew that they were spatial. I built up the surface, but I knew underneath there was volume, and it was just a question of dealing with the volume within the construction.

Since I essentially built paintings and then painted them, I didn’t have to approach the work in a different way in order to think more architecturally than, say, sculpturally or pictorially. Almost any painted relief could be translated into a building.

But how do you move from there to designing architectural structures?  

That’s the easy part. You just enlarge it!

You make it big enough that people can live in it.

So when you set out to work on an architectural project, do you think about how people will use it?

No. I really believe that form can dictate function.

If people are desperate enough, they’ll figure it out. If they can physically manage it—if it’s bigger than a jail cell—they’ll adapt to it.

Several models and sculptures based on your Chinese Pavilion design appear in the Met exhibition, including the large work on the roof. Did you have a sense of how it would frame the skyline when you decided to install it there?

To tell you the truth, I never thought about it. We organized it from the floor plan; we thought that two sculptures would take up one space, and Chinese Pavilion would take up the other space. I was completely surprised by the photographer’s take on the work against the skyline. I guess, like a lot of artists, I’m totally self-involved. I was worried about the work—working on it, getting it up, and everything else involved—not the skyline. The whole idea was to carry the progression of sculpture and architecture downstairs up into the new work on the roof.

How do you respond to critics, who have said that your architectural work lacks the strength of your paintings and wall reliefs?

I haven't heard that from any architectural critics, and I haven't heard it from any architects either.

How do architects respond to your architectural projects?

Politely. And some even encouragingly, but by and large I think most architects—you know, most artists—are more worried about themselves. They’re relatively indifferent to what other people are doing.

Who are some contemporary architects that you admire?

Well, I love Richard. I like Frank Gehry, and I think Santiago Calatrava is a transcendent genius. There is hardly anything good out there that I don’t like, and a lot of things that aren’t great, I like too.