Frank Stella, who died on 4 May at the age of 87, was only 23 when a clutch of his Black Paintings was included in ‘16 Americans’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The critic Irving Sandler later described them as the most important paintings of the 1960s: the fact that the show opened in 1959 says everything about their agenda-setting power. They were intensely dark, glossy pictures
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