Frank Stella's Polish Village Series and Related Works: Heritage and Alliance

Abstract

Frank Stella, who has maintained a star profile on the international art scene for decades, created a number of works of art which reflect interest in Jewish and Holocaust subject matter in an abstract vocabulary. A Catholic, Stella reveals in his black pinstripe oil, Die Fahne Hoch (1959), his awareness of Nazi marching songs. His Polish Village series (1970-73), which comprises 130 large-scale painted constructions, serves to evoke, through his specific titles, these once flourishing wooden synagogues and their communities. Inspired by a text filled with photographs of these buildings, Stella especially admired their beauty of carpentry. The geometry of the designs, the decorative and interwoven details of their facades, influenced his colorful sculptural reliefs. Stella's 1982-84 set of prints, Had Gadya , based on Lissitsky's lithographs for the Had Gadya song of the Passover seder, is also discussed in this article. Stella transformed Lissitsky's illustrations into his own abstract imagery. All of these works ultimately refer to lost European Jewish life.