“There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. The first is learning something and the second is making something.”

—Frank Stella

Painted in 1957, Stella’s junior year at Princeton University, Andover Prep references the artist’s secondary education at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where, fitting for an early painting, the school’s motto was Finis Origine Pendet (“The End Depends Upon the Beginning”). At Andover, Stella, with dark hair and olive skin, stood out against the primarily preppy, upper-class preppy student body; in his yearbook, his classmates described him as sarcastic and a cynic.ⁱ However, it was also at Andover that the young artist was able to immerse himself in an extensive, uncharacteristically progressive studio art program that made a serious study of abstract compositions possible. He was also exposed to the notion of living a life in art through his teacher Patrick Morgan and his wife Maud, who hosted nonalcoholic cocktail parties for students where they could peruse their art-studded walls, listen to jazz, and converse; Stella, with fellow future titans of contemporary art, Hollis Frampton and Carl Andre, were regularly in attendance.ⁱⁱ

Morgan had studied under and was friends with Hans Hofmann, and through his teachings and the generally experimental curriculum, Stella became one of the first major painters in the modern tradition to have been formed almost entirely through the practice of abstract art rather than a schooling of figuration.ⁱⁱⁱ As he began to form his abstract style, his talents did not go unnoticed; he was awarded the Morse Prize, named for Andover alum Samuel Morse, as “the student who best combines native creative ability with craftsmanship, as evidenced in a developed personal style.”

“It seemed like a real kind of breakthrough, and in a way, it was… I still feel rooted in Abstract Expressionism – or New York School – as I probably always will be. It interests me as the painting I was formed around.”

—Frank Stella

After Andover, Stella went on as a history major to Princeton – a school with no studio art program at the time – where he painted independently his freshman year. Later, once the university introduced them, Stella took studio art classes and became fully converted to a form of Abstract Expressionism through both his teachings under William Seitz and Stephen Greene, along with firsthand encounters he with paintings of the genre at New York galleries.^iv The present painting on paper Andover Prep is emblematic of Stella’s overarching style while attending Princeton, which was primarily derived from the likes of de Kooning, Frankenthaler, and Kline.^v It was only in his last month at Princeton that Stella began to develop the unmistakable style for which he is now known, using the visual vocabulary of Ab Ex as building blocks towards his own distinct language of abstraction.

ⁱ Adam D. Weinberg, “The End Depends Upon the Beginning,” in ed. Michael Auping, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, 2015, p. 3.
ⁱⁱ Ibid, p. 5.
ⁱⁱⁱ William S. Rubin, Frank Stella, 1970, p. 8.
^iv Ibid, p. 9.
^v Ibid, p. 10.