Lot Essay
In the fall of 1970, Stella underwent knee surgery which kept him in the hospital for a protracted period. He was visited there by the architect Richard Meier, who gave him a book about Polish synagogue architecture, Wooden Synagogues by Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka (Warsaw, 1959). Stella was intrigued by the extraordinary creativity evident in the spatial arrangements and carpentry of the wooden buildings.
The architecture of the synagogues made Stella think again about his Black paintings:
They're architectonic...in the sense of building--of making buildings. My whole way of thinking about painting has alot to do with building... I enjoy and find it more fruitful to think about many organizational or spatial concepts in architectural terms because when you think about them strictly in design terms they become flat and very boring problems. (Quoted in W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, p. 46)
In the hospital Stella produced forty-two drawings, each rendered twice, the first time freehand, the second squared up on graph paper. Over the next three years he converted these drawings into 130 large collages and mixed media constructions, making two full-size works from each design and a third from each design after the fourteenth. Chyr III was the fifteenth drawing to be made into large-scale reliefs. In the first full-size work made from each drawing, felt, paper and painted canvas were attached to composite boards reinforced by rigid strainers. In the second version, the collaged materials were of significant thickness and the whole was laid on a rigid panel; Rubin notes that this "created what was, in effect, a shaped collage-relief (but one in which the planes were all still parallel to the wooden support)" (Ibid., p. 32). The third version of each relief (after the fourteenth) was a triwall construction.
All the synagogues depicted in the book Wooden Synagogues were destroyed by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945. Stella describes the Polish Village series as being "about the obliteration of an entire culture." (Quoted in Ibid., p. 40)
See Lot 51 for a photograph of one of the original Polish synagogues.
The architecture of the synagogues made Stella think again about his Black paintings:
They're architectonic...in the sense of building--of making buildings. My whole way of thinking about painting has alot to do with building... I enjoy and find it more fruitful to think about many organizational or spatial concepts in architectural terms because when you think about them strictly in design terms they become flat and very boring problems. (Quoted in W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, p. 46)
In the hospital Stella produced forty-two drawings, each rendered twice, the first time freehand, the second squared up on graph paper. Over the next three years he converted these drawings into 130 large collages and mixed media constructions, making two full-size works from each design and a third from each design after the fourteenth. Chyr III was the fifteenth drawing to be made into large-scale reliefs. In the first full-size work made from each drawing, felt, paper and painted canvas were attached to composite boards reinforced by rigid strainers. In the second version, the collaged materials were of significant thickness and the whole was laid on a rigid panel; Rubin notes that this "created what was, in effect, a shaped collage-relief (but one in which the planes were all still parallel to the wooden support)" (Ibid., p. 32). The third version of each relief (after the fourteenth) was a triwall construction.
All the synagogues depicted in the book Wooden Synagogues were destroyed by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945. Stella describes the Polish Village series as being "about the obliteration of an entire culture." (Quoted in Ibid., p. 40)
See Lot 51 for a photograph of one of the original Polish synagogues.