Frank Stella Retrospective Headlines French Art Museum’s American Season

As the U.S. marks 250 years of independence, a contemporary art museum in the lesser-known French city of Saint-Étienne is celebrating the influence of American artists and how ideas crossed the Atlantic to shape it, with two major exhibitions, including a landmark Frank Stella retrospective. Saint-Étienne deserves wider recognition beyond France for many reasons, not least MAMC+ (Musée d’art moderne et contemporain), whose collection of modern and contemporary art is the second-largest held by a French public museum after the Centre Pompidou. The history of MAMC+ is closely tied to Saint-Étienne’s transformation from a booming industrial center into a city with an international reputation for art and design. The collection began at the city’s Museum of Art and Industry, where curator Maurice Allemand championed modern art after World War II, before expanding under his successor, Bernard Ceysson, into a major collection of contemporary and international works. Today, it holds more than 23,000 works spanning modern and contemporary art, photography and design, reflecting Saint-Étienne’s long-standing links with manufacturing and craftsmanship.

The “American Season” running until January 3, 2027, reflects nearly six decades of artistic exchange across the Atlantic. Running until January 3, 2027, the season pairs a major exhibition of American artist Frank Stella, Frank Stella: Minimal / Maximal, with Flying Colors: A Dialogue with the Collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which brings works from the Minneapolis museum into dialogue with MAMC+’s own collection.

Frank Stella: Minimal / Maximal

Minimal/Maximal is curated by Alexandre Quoi, Deputy Director at the museum, in collaboration with Frank Stella’s daughter, filmmaker and art historian Rachel Stella. Their clever curation has brought together works that trace the evolution of American art while revealing the connections, influences and exchanges that shaped Frank Stella’s practice and the wider transatlantic art scene.

Frank Stella: Minimal / Maximal, the first museum retrospective dedicated to the artist since his death in 2024, brings together around 100 works across the vast gallery spaces. You couldn’t ask for a better setting for this artist’s works. The high ceilings and vast walls give Stella’s monumental, vividly colored works room to command the space.

The show traces Stella’s career from the 1950s and his radical rethinking of abstraction to experiments in painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture and architecture. Organized in collaboration with the Addison Gallery of American Art in Massachusetts, the exhibition combines works from Stella’s own collection with loans from French institutions and private collectors. Three major works held by MAMC+ provide the starting point for a chronological survey that explores his early influences and connections with artists like Carl Andre, Hans Hofmann, Donald Judd, Vassily Kandinsky, Ellsworth Kelly, Yves Klein, Agnes Martin and Mark Rothko.

The retrospective begins with Stella’s early career, presenting works, some previously unseen, that reveal his first experiments with abstraction, alongside pieces by artists who influenced him, including Mark Rothko and Franz Kline. The exhibition unfolds across three sections, tracing Stella’s journey from radical simplicity to exuberant complexity. The exhibition includes a focus on Stella’s groundbreaking Black Paintings, which helped pave the way for Minimalism, alongside transitional works that trace his move toward increasingly complex forms of abstraction.

Works by contemporaries including Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly and Kenneth Noland place his early experiments within the wider evolution of modern American art. The second section bursts into Stella’s self-described “maximalist” period, from 1970 to 1989, with layered surfaces and sculptural reliefs from the Polish Village and Cones and Pillars series. The final section follows his restless experimentation from 1990 to 2024, as paintings expanded into monumental constructions, sculptures and architectural projects, including the Stella Chapel in Le Muy and the Band Shell in Cherbourg. Documentary films add the artist’s own reflections to this progression.

Flying Colors: A Dialogue with the Collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art

Flying Colors brings together 160 works by around 40 American artists from the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and MAMC+, tracing developments in American art from 1950 to today. Named after Alexander Calder’s vividly colored airplane, the exhibition explores transatlantic influences, including European artists who sought refuge in the U.S. during World War II and American artists inspired by Paris. It opens with Black Mountain College, the experimental North Carolina art school where former Bauhaus teacher Josef Albers helped shape artists including Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly. The show also examines the Federal Art Project, a New Deal initiative that supported more than 5,000 artists during the Great Depression and brought art to a wider public.

Flying Colors traces the evolution of American art, from Color Field painting and Minimalism to Pop Art and works exploring race and identity. The exhibition reveals how transatlantic exchange, social change and distinctly American experiences reshaped modern art.

As the art world’s focus shifted from Paris to New York, Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Kenneth Noland explored expansive areas of color. Minimalists including Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Sol LeWitt embraced geometric forms and industrial materials, while Pop artists Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Ed Ruscha blurred the boundaries between popular culture and fine art. Other artists, including Louise Nevelson, Sheila Hicks and James Turrell, explored materials, the body, spirituality and the natural world.

By bringing American artists into a French museum, MAMC+ creates a space to compare how artists on both sides of the Atlantic have challenged exclusion and questioned whose stories are told. This dialogue reflects the exhibition’s wider theme of cultural exchange, showing how ideas travel across borders and acquire new meaning in different contexts. Continuing the project, the plan is for the Minneapolis Institute of Art plans to present works from MAMC+’s collection in 2030.

MAMC+ — Practical Information

MAMC+ is located at Rue Fernand Léger, 42270 Saint-Priest-en-Jarez, France and opens Wednesday to Friday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and weekends until 6:30 p.m. (closed Tuesdays); admission is €6.50, with reduced tickets at €5 and free entry for under-26s, and the museum is accessible by tram T1 or T3, with free visitor parking.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com