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Lot Essay
‘It’s not so unusual that a shaped canvas could turn to a relief that in effect is a shaped canvas pulled apart. It seems to me a fairly natural extension of the kind of paintings I was making in the mid-sixties, like the eccentric polygons, and to take each piece itself, to make each piece to be more literal or more there; and I think there was also an attempt to literally break with the surface continuity. It’s not just the flatness of the surface, it’s the continuousness of the flat surface; and once you violate that in a certain sense, in a certain obvious way, things open up’ – F. Stella
A vibrant triumph of colour and form, Nowe Miasto III (New Town III) (1973) projects joyfully into three dimensions. Part of the 1970-73 Polish Villages series, Frank Stella’s important first foray into reliefs, this work sees the chromatic and linear impulses of his early geometric paintings freed into architectural space on an awesome scale. The work’s jutting, angular shapes and varied topography also presage Stella’s later turn to large-scale sculpture, a major focus of the acclaimed retrospective currently on display at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. With its brilliant hues and varied textures of fabric, paint and cardboard, Nowe Miasto III is a vivid material presence, but its structural and tonal movements are carefully modulated. The work’s lilac crossbeam follows an architectonic logic, its colour anchoring the red and blue fields below; ochre buttresses bracket the lower half, ordering the work’s diagonals. The resulting object vibrates with masterful force and beauty.
While in hospital in the summer of 1970, Stella was given a book. Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka’s Wooden Synagogues (1956) documents the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century synagogues of Poland that were destroyed during the Second World War. It was the distinctive architecture of these vanished structures that inspired the Polish Villages. Nowe Miasto III (1973) is a late work in this seminal sequence. In a celebratory reimagining, the synagogues’ vertical beams and slanted roofs are recalled in a dynamic chord of tones. The work is an evocation of vernacular craftsmanship and communal building, and its irregular shapes recall the synagogues’ destruction even as they gesture towards their beauty. Within the series there are three iterations of each work, progressing from appliquéd canvas in the first versions, through additional colours and materials such as plywood board in the second, to the third set to which this work belongs: the most three-dimensional group, with panels tilted out toward the viewer. It was here that Stella’s sculpture first launched boldly forward from the picture plane. As is echoed in the graphic vigour of Nowe Miasto III, at this stage in his career Stella was experimenting with the themes of Russian Constructivism, a movement that had disavowed art as autonomous and insisted on its being embedded in social praxis. Works such as Nowe Miasto III further complicate this idea when viewed within Stella’s oeuvre: his work, beginning with the stark Black Paintings (1958-60), is sometimes seen as part of a coolly detached reaction to the Abstract Expressionism that dominated the mid-century American art scene. However, what looks like cold and calculated geometry in the 1960s Minimalist avant-garde can be charged with intense, personal spirit. Indeed, Stella’s abstract paintings imbued fields of colour with potent feeling and kinetic energy seeking to break out from the acute angles of his compositions. In works like Nowe Miasto III, colour and form have become unbridled, the escape from two dimensions opening an even more powerful zone for expression.
As the artist explains, ‘it’s not so unusual that a shaped canvas could turn to a relief that in effect is a shaped canvas pulled apart. It seems to me a fairly natural extension of the kind of paintings I was making in the mid-sixties, like the eccentric polygons, and to take each piece itself, to make each piece to be more literal or more there; and I think there was also an attempt to literally break with the surface continuity. It’s not just the flatness of the surface, it’s the continuousness of the flat surface; and once you violate that in a certain sense, in a certain obvious way, things open up’ (F. Stella, quoted in J. Fowler, ‘Frankie Says,’ Circa, No. 24, September - October 1985, p.31). The Polish Villages broke with artistic tradition just as they disrupted the flatness of the picture plane. Nowe Miasto III captures this vital moment in Stella’s evolution of post-painterly abstraction, both beautifully echoing the past and presenting a pictorial structure that is electrifyingly new.
A vibrant triumph of colour and form, Nowe Miasto III (New Town III) (1973) projects joyfully into three dimensions. Part of the 1970-73 Polish Villages series, Frank Stella’s important first foray into reliefs, this work sees the chromatic and linear impulses of his early geometric paintings freed into architectural space on an awesome scale. The work’s jutting, angular shapes and varied topography also presage Stella’s later turn to large-scale sculpture, a major focus of the acclaimed retrospective currently on display at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art. With its brilliant hues and varied textures of fabric, paint and cardboard, Nowe Miasto III is a vivid material presence, but its structural and tonal movements are carefully modulated. The work’s lilac crossbeam follows an architectonic logic, its colour anchoring the red and blue fields below; ochre buttresses bracket the lower half, ordering the work’s diagonals. The resulting object vibrates with masterful force and beauty.
While in hospital in the summer of 1970, Stella was given a book. Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka’s Wooden Synagogues (1956) documents the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century synagogues of Poland that were destroyed during the Second World War. It was the distinctive architecture of these vanished structures that inspired the Polish Villages. Nowe Miasto III (1973) is a late work in this seminal sequence. In a celebratory reimagining, the synagogues’ vertical beams and slanted roofs are recalled in a dynamic chord of tones. The work is an evocation of vernacular craftsmanship and communal building, and its irregular shapes recall the synagogues’ destruction even as they gesture towards their beauty. Within the series there are three iterations of each work, progressing from appliquéd canvas in the first versions, through additional colours and materials such as plywood board in the second, to the third set to which this work belongs: the most three-dimensional group, with panels tilted out toward the viewer. It was here that Stella’s sculpture first launched boldly forward from the picture plane. As is echoed in the graphic vigour of Nowe Miasto III, at this stage in his career Stella was experimenting with the themes of Russian Constructivism, a movement that had disavowed art as autonomous and insisted on its being embedded in social praxis. Works such as Nowe Miasto III further complicate this idea when viewed within Stella’s oeuvre: his work, beginning with the stark Black Paintings (1958-60), is sometimes seen as part of a coolly detached reaction to the Abstract Expressionism that dominated the mid-century American art scene. However, what looks like cold and calculated geometry in the 1960s Minimalist avant-garde can be charged with intense, personal spirit. Indeed, Stella’s abstract paintings imbued fields of colour with potent feeling and kinetic energy seeking to break out from the acute angles of his compositions. In works like Nowe Miasto III, colour and form have become unbridled, the escape from two dimensions opening an even more powerful zone for expression.
As the artist explains, ‘it’s not so unusual that a shaped canvas could turn to a relief that in effect is a shaped canvas pulled apart. It seems to me a fairly natural extension of the kind of paintings I was making in the mid-sixties, like the eccentric polygons, and to take each piece itself, to make each piece to be more literal or more there; and I think there was also an attempt to literally break with the surface continuity. It’s not just the flatness of the surface, it’s the continuousness of the flat surface; and once you violate that in a certain sense, in a certain obvious way, things open up’ (F. Stella, quoted in J. Fowler, ‘Frankie Says,’ Circa, No. 24, September - October 1985, p.31). The Polish Villages broke with artistic tradition just as they disrupted the flatness of the picture plane. Nowe Miasto III captures this vital moment in Stella’s evolution of post-painterly abstraction, both beautifully echoing the past and presenting a pictorial structure that is electrifyingly new.