Albert Stadler (1923-2000) was an American abstract painter whose luminous stained canvases place him within the second generation of the New York School and the important Color Field tradition that emerged from it. Born in Vienna, Austria, Stadler emigrated to the United States with his family as a young man, escaping the political upheavals of prewar Europe. He served in the United States Army during the Second World War and afterward pursued his artistic training in New York, where he settled and would spend the rest of his life.

Stadler emerged as a mature artist during the extraordinary flowering of American abstract painting in the 1950s and 1960s. He became closely associated with the community of Color Field painters who were extending the innovations of the first-generation Abstract Expressionists into new formal and material territory. Working with thinned pigment applied to unprimed canvas, Stadler produced paintings in which color soaked directly into the fabric of the support, giving the surface a distinctive luminosity and a sense of light emerging from within the picture itself. This stain-painting approach connected him to Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Jules Olitski, and his work found early critical support from the influential critic Clement Greenberg, who championed the Color Field tradition throughout the postwar decades.

Stadler's mature paintings combine soft atmospheric passages with more clearly structured chromatic zones, and his compositions balance the freedom of poured and stained color with a considered sense of overall design. His pictures reward extended looking, and his refined color relationships give his best canvases a quiet, contemplative authority.

Stadler exhibited widely throughout his career, including at leading New York galleries associated with Color Field painting, and his work was included in significant museum surveys of postwar American abstraction. His paintings are held today in the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, and other major American collections, where they remain valued examples of American abstract painting from a particularly rich period in its history.