Polish Museum Exhibits US Artist Frank Stella's Synagogues

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U.S. artist Frank Stella poses in front of one of his works at an exhibition devoted to him.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — An exhibition is opening in Warsaw of abstract works by prominent American painter Frank Stella that were inspired by painted wooden synagogues that once existed across Poland but were destroyed by the Nazis during World War II.

"Frank Stella and the Synagogues of Historic Poland" opens Friday at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews and will run through June 20.

Museum officials say it is the first time that Stella's geometrical and highly abstract works have been shown alongside the sources that inspired him — architectural drawings and documentary photos of synagogues taken before the war — as well as models and drawings of his own that he used to create his large-scale constructions.

The works are from his Polish Village series produced in the 1970s. He embarked on that project after he was inspired by a 1959 book by Polish architects Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka entitled "Wooden Synagogues." The exhibition also features photographs of the synagogues by Szymon Zajczyk, a Jewish photographer and art historian who was killed in the Holocaust.

Poland was once home to Europe's largest Jewish community, a vibrant community that numbered nearly 3.5 million people before the war. Most were killed in the Holocaust, with many traces of their culture also destroyed.

Museum director Dariusz Stola said his institution is an appropriate venue for the works because one of its key exhibits is a spectacular, full-scale recreation of a 17th-century painted synagogue — the kind that inspired Stella's creations.

The museum is holding two days of events starting Thursday celebrating the 79-year-old New York-based artist, who traveled to Warsaw for the opening.

Stella has worked as an artist for more than 60 years. His works are on display in museums and galleries across the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

By VANESSA GERA

New Exhibition At Warsaw's Jewish History Museum Shows Pre-Holocaust Jewish Life When Population Was 3,500,000, Now 20,000

Contributed by Monica Scislowska, AP.

Visitors walk through a new exhibition by the Museum of the History of Polish Jews, in Warsaw, Poland, on Thursday, March 27, 2014. The exhibition that will run through June 30 documents Jewish life in Warsaw before the Holocaust.(AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)

Old films, music recordings and everyday objects are among items that recreate the atmosphere of Jewish life in Warsaw until World War II in a new exhibition at Warsaw's Jewish history museum.

The "Warszawa, Warsze" - "Warsaw" in Polish and Yiddish - exhibition opens Friday at the new Museum of the History of Polish Jews, and will run through June 30. In sections dedicated to writers, artists, family sagas and daily life it shows how the Jews and the city interacted, influencing and enriching each other. The loss of Jewish Warsaw is best shown in pictures comparing some sites as they are now - modern hotels and streets - with the low, old-style architecture of their Jewish times.

"We want to show this melting pot of the two cultures," Katarzyna Nowakowska-Sito, a museum deputy director, told a news conference Thursday.

Until the Holocaust, Warsaw had the world's second-largest Jewish community, after New York, Nowakowska-Sito said. One in three of the 1.5 million Warsaw residents was Jewish.

"The exhibition shows the dual character that the city had until 1939, when the Jewish part of it started to vanish," she said.

The multimedia core exhibition is to open later this year in the impressive modern building and will document in detail the thousand-year-long history of the vibrant Jewish life and culture in Poland that influenced all of the Jewish diaspora.

The museum building -largely funded by Poland's government and located on territory that was the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II - is already open to visitors, serving as a cultural and educational center offering films and lectures.

Some 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland before the war. Most of them were killed in the Holocaust, under the Nazi occupation. Many survivors fled under communist-sponsored anti-Semitic propaganda in the late 1960s.

The Jewish presence has been rebuilt since Poland shed communism in 1989, but the Jewish population of the country is still estimated at only around 20,000.