Frank Stella produced his Polish Village Series of collages between 1970 and 1974. The extensive cycle entailed forty works, each with three separate iterations.

First, Stella made a collage of flat materials on canvas.

Second, he mounted the same materials onto a wooden support to lend further dimension.

Finally, as in this work, a cardboard structure supports tilted planes of acrylic, felt, and canvas.

Each work in the series is titled after a village in Poland and refers specifically to their synagogues, which were constructed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries and destroyed under Nazi occupation between 1939 and 1945.

Post-Holocaust memory and measured abstraction have been frequent concerns for Stella since his early reactions, in the late 1950s, against Abstract Expressionist painting.

Author: Amy L. Powell, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, 2019