Nasielk III

Frank Stella, 1972 · Gallery 415 · Floor 4

Okay. So this is the “what you see is what you see” guy. Frank Stella. Look at that maroon piece. It comes down the right side, turns the corner, and becomes a shelf. Then you’ve got those three dark slats leaning into it. Cardboard and felt. Nine feet tall. So, keep that in mind, because he starts with black stripes. So Stella graduates from Princeton in 1958 and makes a living painting houses. At that time, the big thing in painting is emotion. Stella’s not having it. So he takes a house painter’s brush and black enamel and paints stripes that follow the edges of the canvas. Leaves a little pinstripe of bare canvas between them. And these paintings get him into MoMA. He’s twenty-three, four of them go up on the walls, and the museum buys one. Some critics think they’re empty. Others think they’re monumental. A few years later, somebody interviews him on the radio, and he says, “What you see is what you see.” The interviewer says, “That doesn’t leave too much, does it?” And Stella says, “I don’t know what else there is.” By 1970, MoMA gives him a retrospective. He’s thirty-three. Youngest artist they’d ever given one to. Later that year, he has knee surgery and gets stuck in a hospital bed. An architect friend comes to visit, and brings him a book called Wooden Synagogues. Pictures of these old wooden buildings in Poland. Roofs stacked on roofs. Most had been destroyed in the war. Stella starts drawing. Those drawings become a whole series, named for towns in the book. And eventually, you get this. Pieces tipping out from the wall. The flat-stripe guy, and his painting’s started to stand up. This one’s named for Nasielsk, north of Warsaw. So you go back to the book, and there are just two old pictures of its wooden synagogue. That building was gone long before the war. By 1880, it was falling down. They took it apart and replaced it with a brick one. Almost sixty years before the Nazis arrived. Now look at that big dark triangle up top. You might see a roof. Those slats might start looking like rafters. The shelf, a sill. It’s still the same triangle. But now you’ve got that building in your head.

▶ Listen on Listen to Frank

Also in Gallery 415