Frank Stella

While recovering from knee surgery in 1970, Frank Stella was referred to a book entitled Wooden Synagogues, a documentary of the buildings burned down by the Nazis as they marched through Poland.  Lipsko is a small town located in the south east of Poland.  Stella created a series of forty pencil sketches based on the images from this book.  These sketches were then executed into a series, entitled Polish Villages, of reliefs, in three stages, from 1970-1973.  This new direction in Stella’s work marked a turning point in his career as he moved from two-dimension works into releifs and towards three-dimension metal sculptures.  “The Polish pictures were well designed and very tight in terms of engineering.  We spent a tremendous amount of time with detail.” (Frank Stella in Sidney Guberman, Frank Stella, New York, 1995, p. 140)  The Polish Villages series was first executed in flat materials, collaged on canvas.  The second version was executed in raised materials affixed to a wooden support.  The third version incorporated tilted planes built into a Tri-Wall cardboard support. The new series had a strong affinity to and was influenced by the Russian Constructavists, most notably to Kasimir Malevich’s architectural drawings.