Frank Stella Chodorow II (Chodorów I) 1971
In the late 1950s, Frank Stella’s austere “black paintings,” in which thin white lines painted on a black ground echoed the form of the canvas, gained him widespread recognition. By the 1960s he was acknowledged as a leading exponent of Minimalism, which emphasized the artwork as a physical object independent of any allusions to the outside world. As Stella famously said, “What you see, is what you see.”
In the 1970s, Stella began producing series of works that became increasingly complex in terms of space and form, eventually developing into what he called “maximalist” paintings. The Polish Village series was the first step in this progression. The works in this series feature planes of color that abut and overlap to create a composition whose outside form conforms to the shape of its internal components. The interaction of colors and surface textures, and the occasional suggestion of overlapping planes, create an impression of shallow space, as in relief. Stella described the work’s planes as suspended upon “imaginary axes, floating in front of my face.”
The series was inspired by the geometric forms of the early 20th- century Russian Constructivism and by the carpentry of Eastern European wooden synagogues. The titles of the individual works in the series are derived from the names of Polish towns whose wooden synagogues had been destroyed during the Nazi occupation. In spite of this emotional weight, Stella still insisted that his paintings were simply compositions, not commentaries.
Identification
Title
Chodorow II (Chodorów I)
Production Date
1971
Object Number
1997.23
Credit Line
Collection Pérez Art Museum Miami, gift of Mimi and Bud Floback
Copyright
© Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
https://www.pamm.org/en/artwork/1997.23
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Physical Qualities
Medium
Acrylic, canvas, felt, and enamel on shaped canvas
Dimensions
108 x 106 inches
Visual Description
Chodorów II by artist Frank Stella is a felt, paper, and canvas collage on canvas made in 1971. It is hung on the wall, measures roughly nine feet by nine feet, and is around two inches thick. This artwork is an example of geometric abstraction, which is a style of art that’s based on the use of geometric objects placed in an imagined setting, it does not depict a visual reality. Although the measurements might imply that it is a square, it is not. The art piece is comprised of several segmented geometric shapes. One could describe the overall shape as looking like a beige cube tilted on one of its corners and has multi-color diagonal rectangular shapes coming out the top of it. Starting with the tilted beige cube-like shape, the left facing side has a purple square that almost completely covers the left facing side. This purple square that sits on top of the beige background is not centered, but is instead placed a little higher. Below the purple square, is a skinny purple rectangle parallel to the bottom of the cube. Moving on to the right-facing side of the beige cube, we see a skinny turquoise rectangle perpendicular to the bottom of the cube and placed right in the center. There is also a red rectangle placed right against the right edge of the cube that tapers off towards the right corner into a point. The top side of the cube is just a long red rectangle that extends past the limits of the cube on the right side and tapers off into a point. The length of this is almost double the length of the cube. Inside this rectangle, there are two much smaller and skinner purple rectangular segments, one on the left side and the other on the right and they both extend all the way until its respective edges. Sitting right on top of this long red rectangle is a slightly shorter dark green rectangle that appears to go through another shape- a smaller, beige, vertical rectangle. This larger rectangle has one straight edge on the left side and a tapered edge on the right. On top of that, there is a smaller horizontal dark green rectangle intersecting the larger rectangle it on the right side. Inside of this smaller rectangle there is an even smaller and skinnier turquoise rectangle right in the center.
