The artist, who has died at eighty-seven, rattled standards of modernist abstraction rather as Bob Dylan did those of folk music.

He was consumed with abstract painting and determined to keep it alive even when it became an unpopular cause among younger artists.

Frank Stella, the American artist renowned for his abstract works, died on Saturday at the age of 87, his longtime representative said in a statement.

Ever restless, Frank Stella dynamically shifted his work in both style and scale while defying categorical boundaries between painting and sculpture as he became one of America's most prolific artists of the past half century.

Frank Stella, a painter, sculptor and printmaker whose constantly evolving works served as landmarks of the minimalist and post-painterly abstraction art movements, has died.