The death of the renowned American artist Frank Stella leads us to recall the major exhibition of his work in 2016, inspired by the destroyed wooden synagogues of Eastern Europe.
Stella died Saturday at his home in New York, aged 87.
The exhibition, Frank Stella and Synagogues of Historic Poland, was shown at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, February 19-June 20, 2016.
It presented a collection of ca. 40 works from Stella’s “Polish village series” that were inspired by the Polish wooden synagogues destroyed by the Nazis during the Holocaust — his interest was sparked, in fact, by the seminal book Wooden Synagogues, by Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka.
Along with Stella’s works, historic photographs and architectural drawings of the synagogues and other material were shown. Many of the photographs were taken by Szymon Zajczyk, a Jewish cataloguer and art historian who perished in the Warsaw ghetto.
POLIN called the exhibit “the first assembly of works by Frank Stella from his extraordinary Polish Village Series juxtaposed with their sources of inspiration.”
In the early 1970s, Stella was captivated and then motivated by a book by Polish architects Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka entitled Wooden Synagogues (1959) to create a series of large-scale irregular wall constructions, collaged and painted, along with innovative prints, scaled wooden models, and precise drawings on the subject. Each work is named after a town in Poland in which a wooden synagogue had once stood. All the synagogues have since been destroyed.
A key installation at the POLIN Museum is the 85-percent-scale recreation of the painted ceiling and roof of the destroyed 17th century wooden synagogue that once stood in former Gwoździec, Poland (now Hvizdets, Ukraine).
Click to read more about the exhibition on the POLIN web site
Read our post about the exhibition