Frank Stella is an unstoppable force. His work is so consistently unexpected and, more often than not, so full of youthful nerve that it’s difficult to believe he has been exhibiting for almost half a century—since 1959, when one of his severe, brooding Pinstripe paintings was included in a group show at Tibor de Nagy Gallery. That Stella was then a month short of his twenty-third birthday is unremarkable, these days, but it was noteworthy at the time. Noteworthy, too, was the Museum of Modern Art’s acquiring a major Pinstripe painting later that year. The rest, as they say, is art history, an impressive list ranging from the artist’s inclusion in such seminal shows as Clement Greenberg’s “Post-Painterly Abstraction” in 1964, and Michael Fried’s “Three American Painters” in 1965 (the other two were Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski) to his delivering the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1983–1984, later published as Working Space; there was a full-scale retrospective at MOMAin 1970 (Stella was thirty-four) and, since then, a host of equally distinguished exhibitions all over the world. He’s made prints of amazing complexity, explored a staggering variety of materials and methods, and even adopted computer technology. Between 1991 and 1993, Stella designed a series of monumental murals for the ceiling, proscenium, and lobbies of the new Princess of Wales theater in Toronto, and created the reliefs on the ends of theater rows and boxes. And much more. Come to think of it, even this casual