Return to Frank Stella
Works in Stella's Polish Village series of the early 1970s were named after towns that were known for their wooden synagogues. Stella was fascinated by photographs published in a 1939 book that documented the elaborate carpentry structures that did not survive World War II. In this series, Stella moved from making paintings that suggest relief through their juxtaposition of colored bands to making works with actual relief.
This is one of the most ambitious of Stella's works, constituting a painting that has assumed the freestanding status of sculpture. The cloudlike forms etched onto the surface are digitized smoke rings.
The city of Dresden invited Stella to conceive a design for a cultural park that included an art exhibition space, orangerie, restaurant, bookstore, and botanical garden. Stella proposed a variety of buildings whose shapes were derived from his then-current pictorial practice. Although the Dresden City Council approved Stella's plan, the City Council was overruled by the state of Saxony, and the project remained unrealized. Aspects of this design were later developed for Stella's proposal for a park and museum in Buenos Aires at the request of the collector Eduardo Costantini.
This work is a portion of a full-size model for a structure that Stella has been developing for several years. The leaflike shape of the contours was first proposed in his 1989 design for an addition to the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands. Several models of the Groninger Museum project are also included in the exhibition.
This design for a mausoleum is named after Henry Geldzahler, the Metropolitan's curator of modern art in the 1960s and 1970s.
With works such as this one, Stella announced his move away from strict rectilinear geometry to a free expression of extravagant forms. Using elemental shapes—cones, rods, circular sections—and others, more complex, borrowed from drafting tools, Stella fashioned compositions that he acknowledges were inspired by Wassily Kandinsky's paintings of the 1920s.
Stella conceived this structure as a thirty-four-foot-high band shell to be placed in downtown Miami. Although the structure has been realized elsewhere, Stella abandoned the Miami commission. A large-scale version, The Broken Jug (left-handed version), is also on view in the exhibition.