If you are looking for clues to the character of Frank Stella, the Formula One racing car parked inside his vast studio in upstate New York is a giveaway. 'Ferrari gave that to me,' the American abstract artist tells me nonchalantly, hooking a Cuban cigar from an ashtray beside him. 'It did race, but it doesn't have a motor now, so it's just for show.'
Stella has been probing the limits of painting for more than five decades. His love of fast cars, though, dates from the mid-1970s, when BMW gave him one in exchange for decorating a racing model that competed at Le Mans. Six years later, in 1982, he was arrested for hurtling at 105mph along a highway in New York State. But the supercar inside his studio in Rock Tavern is testament not only to the artist's love of speed. Once driven by Michael Schumacher, it also represents the competitive streak that has blazed through Stella's life.
Take tennis. When he was younger – before, he says, his hip and knees 'gave way' – he used to play for hours, several times a week. After a while, though, his friends stopped playing with him. The gallery director Lawrence Rubin, who gave Stella his second solo show, in Paris in 1961, once said, 'He doesn't play for the fun of playing. He plays to win. And that's the way he plays art.'
Stella is 75 now, but age does not appear to have forced him to alter his game plan. His studio, a former warehouse so large that birds flit overhead as we talk, is full of recent work. There are raucous reliefs, dominated by loops of luminescent colour. There are fantastical sculptures, formed by tangles of stainless steel and carbon fibre. Some of it will feature in a new exhibition – the most extensive show in Britain of Stella's work to date – opening at the Haunch of Venison gallery in London later this month.
British interviewers marvel at Stella's high-pitched New Yorker's voice, reminiscent of Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, but today he sounds a little reedy, giving the impression of a mobster who's been recently cashiered. He settles into his rocking chair, a bottle of Baileys liqueur by his feet.
Stella was born in 1936, to first-generation Sicilians, and grew up in a blue-collar suburb of Boston. His father, a gynaecologist, sent him to Phillips Academy, an elite secondary school in nearby Andover, where he earned a reputation for feistiness (he once lost three front teeth in a dormitory scrap). In 1954 he entered Princeton University, where he excelled as a lacrosse player, and joined a night class in painting and drawing. Before long he was painting for several hours a day, producing work in the style of the Abstract Expressionists. 'I wouldn't have bothered becoming an artist if I didn't like the artists of that generation so much,' he tells me.
After graduating in 1958 he headed straight for New York, where he rented a room on the Lower East Side and spent the summer painting. 'I came here because it was the place where you could see art that I was interested in – it's as simple as that.'
Was it daunting to follow in the footsteps of Pollock, Rothko and de Kooning? 'No,' Stella says. 'They were fabulously uninhibiting – because the work was accessible, and beautiful. It was wildly exciting to be on the scene, which was smaller but way more intense and interesting than today.'
