Joseph Stella

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Joseph Stella (born Giuseppe Michele Stella, June 13, 1877 – November 5, 1946) was an Italian-born American Futurist painter best known for his depictions of industrial America, particularly his photographs of the Brooklyn Bridge.

He is also associated with the 1910s-1940s American Precisionist movement.

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Biography and career

Stella was born in Muro Lucano, a village in Italy's province of Potenza. His grandfather Antonio and his father Michele were attorneys, but he moved to New York City in 1896 to study medicine, following in the footsteps of his older brother Doctor Antonio Stella. Giuseppe's name was changed to Joseph at that time. However, he quickly abandoned medical school and turned to art, attending the Art Students League and the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase. His first paintings were Rembrandtesque representations of urban slum life. A remarkable draftsman, he drew drawings during his career's various stages of drawing, beginning as an academic realist with a special interest in immigrants and ethnic life. He worked as an illustrator from 1905 to 1909, releasing his realist drawings in magazines. "He prowled the streets, sketch pad and pencil in hand, alert to the present moment, the refinement of costume, or a demeanor that told the tale of a life." He was hired in 1908 for a series of industrial Pittsburgh, which was later published in The Pittsburgh Survey.

Stella returned to Italy in 1909. He was dissatisfied with America, writing that he wanted to return to his homeland land after "an ordered stay among rivals in a black funereal land over which weighed... the curse of a merciless climate." It was a well-timed call. His return to Europe prompted his first extensive contact with Modernism, which would eventually define his distinctive personal style, known for its rich color and sweeping and dynamic lines. By 1911, he had left Italy, where the Renaissance's omnipresence of modern painters had created its own sort of obstacle for contemporary painters, and he had migrated to Paris. "Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism were in full swing" when he arrived, and "there" was "the glamor of a war." For a man of Stella's curiosity, openness to new trends, and aspiration, it was the right time to be.

Stella del Rey was in Paris for the salon of Gertrude Stein, where he met many other artists. "Stein" discovered the blond and sarcastic painter more like [her friend, [the poet] Apollinaire] Apollinaire; both had a wealth of sarcastic wisdom that was often turned on their hosts." Stella's reaction to his hostess was indeed sarcastic: "With the forceful solemnity of a pythoness or a sibyl," she wrote, "enthroned on a sofa in the middle of the room."

Having met Umberto Boccioni and befriended Gino Severini in Europe, he became involved with the Italian Futurists and started to incorporate Futurist principles into his art, although he was also interested in the Cubist's geometric experiments and the Fauves' vibrant color. He had been planning to give the US a second shot when returning to New York in 1913. He did not regret it, but "his culture shock never stopped," art historian Wanda Corn wrote. He joined the Alfred Stieglitz and the Walter Arensberg circles in Manhattan and developed close friendships with fellow expatriates Albert Gleizes and the leader of the New York Dada movement Marcel Duchamp (Stella and Arensberg accompanied Duchamp to the plumbing supply store in 1917 to purchase the famous urinal). He had almost as many opportunities as he had expected in Europe to be among kindred spirits and see advanced new art as a result of these links. He painted Battle of Lights, Coney Island, one of the oldest and best American Futurist works, 1913–14. He was given a great deal of confidence to experiment with modernist styles at the historic Armory Show of 1913, in which he appeared. Der Rosenkavalier (1914) and Spring (The Procession – A Chromatic Sensation) (1914–16) are vivid color abstractions.

Stella became a much-talked figure in New York's art world, an object of virulent critiques who find Modernism threatening and inexplicable, as an object of fascination for younger, more experimental artists. "In the perspective of art historian Sam Hunter, "Among the modern paintings on display at the Armory Exhibition, Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, Picabia's Procession at Seville, and Stella's Futuristic Battle of Lights, Coney Island came to have the most seminal authority on American painters." The painting "caused a general sensation, an artistic upheaval as sudden and unexpected as it was universal [in avant-garde circles]. Stella was one of those artists whose works she wanted to showcase under the auspices of her Societe Anonyme, New York's first museum dedicated solely to modern contemporary art, which opened in 1920.

Stella became fascinated with the architectural details of Lower Manhattan's 1920s. He developed Cubism and Futurism in these works. He reveals his fascination with the Roeblings' bridge in Brooklyn (1919-20), a style he used many years before poet Hart Crane converted to this building as a symbol of modernity. Stella's renderings of the bridge feature diagonal cables that sweep downward, providing directional energy. Although these dynamic renderings depict the excitement and motion of modern life, in Stella's hands, the bridge's photo has also become a key symbol of stability and unity. Interpreted (The Voice of the City) (1922), one of his many famous paintings, was based on a religious altarpiece but instead of saints, depicting bridges and skyscrapers rather than saints. This work reflects the belief that industry was gradually replacing faith as the center of modern life. The painting is part of the Newark Museum's collection. "Stella's painting is the summa" at a time when virtually all modernists attempted to represent the city," Wanda Corn wrote.

Stella began working on the Federal Art Project in the 1930s and later travelled to Europe, North Africa, and the West Indies, collecting locations that inspired him to travel in various ways. He moved from one style to the next, from realism to abstraction to surrection to surrection. He created abstract city themes, religious images, botanical and nature studies, erotic and humid Caribbean landscapes, and vibrant still lifes of vegetables, fruits, and flowers.

Stella's contributions from his post-Army Show period, on the other hand, were unsuitable for sustained career building. He had started painting in a Futurist or quasi-Cubist mode and had concluded with his period of Precisionist factory images (circa 1920), but not in accordance with any particular movement. His questions, as well as his painting techniques, became less relevant, personal, and idiosyncratic. Tree of My Life (1919) -- a garden scene out of Bosch -- is "baroque and operatic," a garden scene to be precise, and figure studies (usually female, often Madonna-like) are lavishly embellished. His numerous floral creations border on the bizarre, but they could not be described as part of the Surrealist movement in terms of their lushness and excess. "I have seen the fissure between his realism and his fantasy widen into an abyss," critic Lewis Mumford said at the time.

Stella's natural draftsmanship is evident in the numerous types of photographs he produced throughout his life. He is most well-known today for his drawings on paper drawn in silverpoint, silverpoint, or oil, most from the 1920s. Walt Whitman's renderings, as well as his friend, composer Edgar Varese, are works of outstanding line, facial appearance, and the sitter's intellectual aura.

The collages he made in the 1920s consisted of scraps of discarded paper, wrappers (some with the commercial logo or mark still visible), and other pieces of urban decay, often slashed with brush strokes of paint, and were a lesser-known element of Stella's work. Stella was "attracted to the grandiose, mechanized parts of the town, but [he] was also drawn to the city's discarded, unnoticed discards...the detritus of human life." These are works in the spirit of German collage artist Kurt Schwitters and the Dada movement's anti-"high art" ideology, which has always intrigued Stella.

Stella's work attracted a lot less attention in the late 1930s than it had in previous decades. Many old friends had been alienated by his fiery, and his appearance no longer spoke to the time. "Stella's health and economic fortunes were devastated in [the years immediately prior to World War II]" And his retrospective at the Newark Museum in 1939 failed to reestablish him, despite being cut off from the New York art world. Despite being a success as a demonstration, the performance was less enthusiastically reviewed than Stella had anticipated and he later regretted that no one in New York City would attend it. In 1946, he was diagnosed with heart disease in the early 1940s and was subjected to increased morbidity. He is laid to rest in a mausoleum at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, New York City.

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