The Bell Gallery permanent collection contains two paintings and 82 prints by Frank Stella tracing his career from the 1950s through the 1970s. The earliest work in the collection is Blue Horizon painted in 1958 when he was just 22 years old. Stella built this large square canvas at 5 Eldridge Street in New York City, a small apartment he moved to the summer after he graduated from Princeton. According to Stella’s friend Sidney Guberman, Stella had little money and had to make due with cheap house paint, mostly colors that no one else wanted. At that time Stella was familiar with the New York art scene and was most influenced by the work of Jasper Johns, especially his 1958 one-person show that included flags and targets. The regular horizontal bands of color in Blue Horizon demonstrate the internalization of John’s work while at the same time the drips, spills, and visible brushstrokes continue link Stella to the Abstract Expressionists.  In the catalogue for the 2006 exhibition Stella 1958, Harry Cooper sights Stella’s interest in the psychology of perception and his use of optical effects in the 1958 paintings to work out aspects of repetition, symmetry, and flatness, and to create paintings “that pushed time, memory, and illusion out of the picture.” 

Gabin (1971) is from the Polish Village Series, which is considered a major break in style from Stella’s earlier striped works. Recuperating during a long hospital stay, Stella created a series of forty sketches inspired by a book on 17th- to 19th-century Polish wooden synagogues. These drawings became the foundation for the Polish Village Series. Although these works were built from a variety of materials—Gabin for example, is made with homosote, chipboard, plywood, masonite, canvas, and cardboard—Stella said that “the impulse that goes into them is pictorial...” The works carry on the tradition of Cubism and Russian Constructivism and explore two-dimensional geometric shapes through color and texture. The series was very labor intensive. Each sketch was redrawn on graph paper and then one to four models were built, some just out of plywood, and others with a variety of materials. In the end the forty designs became more than 130 individual works. Although the Polish Village Series is much different in style from the earlier works, the series continues Stella’s interest in geometric patterns and color variations.