Where are the art police when we need them? Frank Stella’s shows of works from his Kleist series at Danese in Chelsea and Jacobson Howard uptown are groaning to the hilt. The multipaneled frieze “Marquise von O” (2000) has had to be chopped up along three walls. The 14-foot-high “Michael Kohlhaas” no. 3 and no. 6 (both 2000) are barely contained by their walls, with lighting tracks shadowed in their upper reaches. Even the working collages at the second venue, each around 5 feet tall, are shown with a couple of pieces from the sequence omitted. Perhaps in an ideal cultural dictatorship, the Matthew Marks Gallery, or Paula Cooper, would be requisitioned and their current shows moved aside. Then the full, madcap series of Stellas inspired by the wacko writings of the schizophrenic German romantic Heinrich von Kleist could be seen in all their protean, cathedralesque glory.

Then again, maybe it is germane both to Kleist and Mr. Stella’s interpretation of him that we should be offered eccentric, awkward, obviously partial views. Kleist was a precursor of Kafka, after all.

If Mr. Stella had behaved himself, art historically speaking, his latest works would be savored serenely in a minimalist art barn. Mr. Stella was a seminal figure in the art world of the 1960s, a bridge between the formalist abstract painters grouped around the critic Clement Greenberg and the emerging Minimalists. His audacious and iconic breakthrough work consisted of thin pinstripe lines arranged in strict regimen against black backgrounds. He spoke for an anti-romantic generation fed up with the mythopoesis of the Abstract Expressionists when, provocatively, he insisted about his aesthetic that “What you see is what you see.”

Mr. Stella’s champions see consistency in his journey from flat, monochrome, reductive canvases to his everything-but-the-kitchen-sink, retina-blasting, multimedia constructions. They see a constant challenge to received ideas about the medium of painting. But from pinstripe to cacophony, radical empiricism to gushing romanticism is quite a turnaround in one career. If early Stellas were manifestos for “less is more,” he is now fully signed up to the “more is never enough” party.

Even in its truncated form,”Marquise von O” is an overwhelming visual experience. There is a mass of swirling forms that loop back and forth, overlapping and interpenetrating. Each is in its own language and kind of space: flat, shallow, receding, and somehow, miraculously, hanging together. It is impossible to take in such an energy-packed, optically and technically busy composition as a single image — the sensation, on the contrary, is of colliding universes. And while one would need to see the whole frieze in its ideal, intended unity to judge for sure, it seems improbable that such willful overload would submit to any kind of pictorial logic or structure.

Kleist isn’t Mr. Stella’s first foray into literary inspiration. In contrast to his Minimalist friends, he had a penchant for poetic titles from the outset, with overt references, for instance, to Samuel Beckett. In the 1980s, an extensive body of work took its theme from “Moby Dick.”

It would be fanciful in the extreme, however, to see any literal, illustrative connection between any of these works, or indeed the Kleist series, and the stories or characters cited in their titles. But strong thematic overlaps between Kleist and Mr. Stella do emerge. The two novellas “Marquise von O” and “Michael Kohlhaas” both deal with wronged individuals whose struggles against personal injustice and violation lead them to bizarre extremes of flouting rules precisely with the aim of ensuring order. Likewise, the method in Mr. Stella madness could be read as the old pinstripe emerging from within the new patchwork.

Indeed, look more closely at the constituent parts of his visually overloaded constructions, and patterns of relationship begin to appear. In the bewildering mix of mediums, it emerges that there are both, as it were, plate and print — actual thin strips of metal and artfully misregistered offprints that look as if they could have been pulled from these or similar surfaces. There are bits that are belligerently, insistently flat, and then there are others that depict ethereal shapes. (Smoke rings are a favored inspiration according to a glowing recent profile of the artist in Cigar Aficionado.)

As an artist who has traveled from the self-consciously non-plus-ultra classicism of the pinstripe to the literally off the wall romanticism of painted sculptural relief and layered collages, Mr. Stella surely savors the subtexts of purity and violation in Kleist’s strange fictions. The Marquise is a widow who discovers, to her surprise, that she has been impregnated during a siege. Through astounding plot twists, various culprits come forward as potential suitors for her hand. For Kleist, this is a tale of typically weird irresolution and mystery. With this in mind, the mural dedicated to her — with its at once interpenetrating and yet demarcated forms and textures — begins to recall another modern artwork devoted to purity and violation, Duchamp’s “Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even.” It turns out that the cramped quarters of these two galleries are the ideal spot for Mr. Stella’s big, strange works.

Both shows until December 22, Danese (535 W. 24th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-223-2227);

Jacobson Howard (22 E. 72nd St. at Madison Avenue, 212-570-2362).