Joseph Stella

(b Muro Lucano, Italy, 13 June 1877; d New York, 5 Nov 1946). American painter and collagist of Italian birth. He arrived in New York in 1896. The following year he enrolled briefly in the Art Students League and then in the New York School of Art (1898), where his ability was recognized by William Merritt Chase. The Lower East Side subject-matter of Stella's early work was similar to that of his contemporaries of the New York Ashcan school. In place of their dark-toned Impressionism, however, Stella's early style was academic in the manner of late 19th-century Italian painting. His first important commission was to depict the industrial workers in Pittsburgh for Survey, a social reform journal.

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Joseph Stella (1877-1946), Italian-born American futurist painter, is best known for his dynamic interpretations of Brooklyn Bridge at night, with its dazzling automobile headlights and soaring crystalline forms.

Joseph Stella was born in Muro Lucano, a mountain village close to Naples. When he was 19, he went to America to study medicine and pharmacology. In 1897 he began to paint and enrolled as a full-time student at the Art Students League and then at the New York School of Art, studying under William Merritt Chase. Stella's earliest painting emulates the manner of Chase, who admired Diego Velázquez, Édouard Manet, and Frans Hals and interpreted American subjects with breadth of handling and richness of palette. Stella made several drawings of immigrants and miners for the magazines Outlook and Survey.

By 1910 Stella was back in Europe. He spent about a year in Italy and then went to Paris, where he met Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and a number of the Italian futurists, including Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, and Gino Severini. Stella's enthusiasm for their art was not immediately translated into his own work, but after he returned to the United States late in 1912 he began his first large futurist painting, Battle of Lights, Coney Island. In this picture, forms are fractured and faceted to form a phantasmagoria of fragmented amusement-park architecture, disembodied by light and bright colors. It owes much to Severini in its conception. When the painting was exhibited in New York City, knowing art patrons admired it, but the general reception was negative.

Stella refined and applied his futurist approach to the American industrial scene, glorifying it by lending to it a precisionist character not unlike that of Charles Sheeler and Niles Spencer.

In 1920 Stella executed his first "Brooklyn Bridge" painting. He was to return to the theme as late as 1939 in his Brooklyn Bridge: Variations on an Old Theme. In these two paintings the scintillating and iridescent light patterns and hyperbolic sweep of steel are fixed by a taut, overriding symmetrical composition.

Stella became an American citizen in 1923. He made numerous trips abroad during the 1920s and 1930s. Visits to North Africa and Barbados inspired him to depict the spirit of a tropical environment in lush color and strong, centrally located forms. He also composed small, delicate, and intimate collages somewhat in the spirit of Paul Klee and Arthur Dove. Stella's development as an artist was marked by impulsiveness and surprising shifts and turns. He died in New York City on Nov. 5, 1946.

Further Reading

Irma B. Jaffe, Joseph Stella (1970), is the most complete study of the artist. Recommended for general background are Milton W. Brown, American Painting: From the Armory Show to the Depression (1955); and Daniel M. Mendelowitz, A History of American Art (rev. ed. 1970).

Additional Sources

Jaffe, Irma B., Joseph Stella, New York: Fordham University Press, 1988.

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Joseph Stella
Brooklyn Bridge by Joseph Stella. Oil. 84" x 76". ca. 1917-18.
Born	June 13, 1877(1877-06-13) Muro Lucano, Italy
Died	November 5, 1946 (aged 69)
Nationality	American
Field	Painting
Training	Art Students League of New York, William Merritt Chase.
Movement	Precisionism, Futurism

Joseph Stella (June 13, 1877 - November 5, 1946) was an Italian-born, American Futurist painter best known for his depictions of industrial America. He is associated with the American Precisionism movement of the 1910s-1940s. He was born in Muro Lucano, Italy but came to New York City in 1896. He studied at the Art Students League of New York under William Merritt Chase. His first paintings are Rembrandtesque depictions of city slum life. In 1908, he was commissioned for a series on industrial Pittsburgh later published in The Pittsburgh Survey.

It was his return to Europe in 1909, and his first contact with modernism, that would truly mold his distinctive personal style.

The mausoleum of Joseph Stella in Woodlawn Cemetery

Returning to New York in 1913, he painted Battle of Lights, Mardi Gras, Coney Island, which is one of the earliest American Futurist works. He is famous for New York Interpreted, a five-paneled work patterned after a religious altarpiece, but depicting bridges and skyscrapers instead of saints. This piece reflects the belief, common at the time, that industry was displacing religion as the center of modern life. It is currently owned by the Newark Museum.

A famous Stella quote is: "I have seen the future and it is good. We will wipe away the religions of old and start anew."

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Joseph Stella

• Pittsburgh Portraits by Joseph Stella: Menu of Portraits at www.clpgh.org Pittsburgh Portraits by Joseph Stella at the website of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
• AskArt page for Joseph Stella

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