NASIELK III
FRANK STELLA, 1972
This painting is named after a place that no longer exists. Frank Stella. Nasielk III. 1972. Looks like a Frank Stella, right? Bright colors, sharp angles, the kind of thing you'd walk past in a museum thinking — abstract geometry, got it, next room. Don't. Nasielsk was a town in central Poland, north of Warsaw. It had a wooden synagogue. Built sometime in the 1700s. Carved beams. Painted ceiling. The kind of building that took three centuries to make, and one afternoon for the Nazis to burn. That was 1939. Stella read about it in the late 1960s in a book called "Wooden Synagogues." Photographs of buildings that didn't exist anymore. Hundreds of them. Almost none of them survived the war. Stella started painting. He named each canvas after a destroyed synagogue. Nasielk. Targowica. Bogoria. Felsztyn. Brzostek. About a hundred and thirty paintings. Each one named for a place that was gone. Now look at this again. The triangle at the top — that's a gable end. The L-shape on the right — corner of a building. Those slats fanning out at the bottom — roof beams. The bands of color aren't decorative. They're architecture. The geometry is what's left of a building burned in 1939. Stella wasn't Jewish. He was an Italian Catholic kid from Massachusetts who'd already made his name as the guy who made shaped canvases. The Polish Village series is the moment his paintings start meaning something. They look like everything before them. They're doing something else. If you didn't know what Nasielk was, this is a sharp mid-century construction. If you know — and most viewers don't — every painting in the series is a record of something burned. No flames. No figures. No memorial wall with the names on it. Stella decided abstract painting could carry it. The painting is named after a place that no longer exists. The painting is what's left.