What kind of artist was Joseph Stella?

Portrait in primary blues and yellow of perhaps a Persian man. He is in profile set against a decorative yellow background with floral elements. The work...

This is an Joseph Stella original pencil drawing “man with beard” . In good condition comes from joseph Stella’s estate. In good condition measu...

Silverpoint and colored pencil on paper, 29 x 23 in. Signed (at lower right): Joseph Stella Executed about 1919 EXHIBITED: Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, November 23, 1985–January 4, 1986, American Masterworks on Paper: Drawings, Watercolors, and Prints, pp. 6, 46 no. 47 illus. // (probably) Richard York Gallery, New York, October 5–November 17, 1990, Joseph Stella: 100 Works on Paper, no. 36 EX COLL.: [Dudensing Galleries, New York]; sale, Christie’s, New York, December 7, 1984, lot 324; [Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1984]; to private collection, 2006 until the present An independent-minded artist who adhered to the credo “Rules don’t exist,” Joseph Stella explored a range of styles, media, and themes, willfully ignoring the “barricades erected by ... [the] self-appointed dictators” of the art establishment (Joseph Stella, “On Painting,” Broom 11 [December 1921], pp. 122–23; Joseph Stella, “Discovery of America: Autobiographical Notes,” Art News 59 [November 1960], p. 41). By doing so, he produced a diverse and highly eclectic body of work, ranging from realist figure subjects, pulsating Futurist cityscapes, and modernist religious...

Joseph Stella was a visionary artist who painted what he saw, an idiosyncratic and individual experience of his time and place. Stella arrived in New York in 1896, part of a wave of Italian immigrants from poverty-stricken Southern Italy. But Stella was not a child of poverty. His father was a notary and respected citizen in Muro Locano, a small town in the southern Appenines. The five Stella brothers were all properly educated in Naples. Stella’s older brother, Antonio, was the first of the family to come to America. Antonio Stella trained as a physician in Italy, and was a successful and respected doctor in the Italian community centered in Greenwich Village. He sponsored and supported his younger brother, Joseph, first sending him to medical school in New York, then to study pharmacology, and then sustaining him through the early days of his artistic career. Antonio Stella specialized in the treatment of tuberculosis and was active in social reform circles. His connections were instrumental in Joseph Stella’s early commissions for illustrations in reform journals. Joseph Stella, from the beginning, was an outsider. He was of the Italian-American community, but did not share its overwhelming poverty and general lack of education. He went back to Italy on several occasions, but was no longer an Italian. His art incorporated many influences. At various times his work echoed the concerns and techniques of the so-called Ashcan School, of New York Dada, of Futurism and, of Cubism, among others. These are all legitimate influences, but Stella never totally committed himself to any group. He was a convivial, but ultimately solitary figure, with a lifelong mistrust of any authority external to his own personal mandate. He was in Europe during the time that Alfred Stieglitz established his 291 Gallery. When Stella returned he joined the international coterie of artists who gathered at the West Side apartment of the art patron Conrad Arensberg. It was here that Stella became close friends with Marcel Duchamp. Stella was nineteen when he arrived in America and studied in the early years of the century at the Art Students League, and with William Merritt Chase, under whose tutelage he received rigorous training as a draftsman. His love of line, and his mastery of its techniques, is apparent early in his career in the illustrations he made for various social reform journals. Stella, whose later work as a colorist is breathtakingly lush, never felt obliged to choose between line and color. He drew throughout his career, and unlike other modernists, whose work evolved inexorably to more and more abstract form, Stella freely reverted to earlier realist modes of representation whenever it suited him. This was because, in fact, his “realist” work was not “true to nature,” but true to Stella’s own unique interpretation. Stella began to draw flowers, vegetables, butterflies, and birds in 1919, after he had finished the Brooklyn Bridge series of paintings, which are probably his best-known works. These drawings of flora and fauna were initially coincidental with his fantastical, nostalgic and spiritual vision of his native Italy which he called Tree of My Life (Mr. and Mrs. Barney A. Ebsworth Foundation and Windsor, Inc., St. Louis, illus. in Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella, exh. cat. [New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1994], p. 111 no. 133). Two Wood Ducks...

A pencil sketch by famed American Modernist Joseph Stella, who burst on to the American scene at the epochal Armory Show of 1913 and whose work is today in the collections of every m...

Joseph Stella(1877-1946) A Corner of Barbados, 1937 Oil on canvas, 11 x 15 inches (27.9 x 38.1 cm) Inscribed on verso: A corner of / Barbados / O:P by / Joseph Stella Provenance The artist; By bequest to his nephew, Sergio Stella, 1946; By descent in the family, until the present Joseph Stella’s artistic career defies easy categorization. He was simultaneously a modernist and traditionalist, a dual citizen of the Old and New World, a bold experimenter and masterful practitioner of time-honored artistic techniques. His iconic paintings of New York City, such as the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island, celebrate modernity and the Machine Age, while his exuberant paintings of the natural world speak to the spiritual revelation that guided and grounded him throughout his life. Until recently, the divergent aspects of Stella’s career “confounded his legacy.” But in Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature, the multi-venue museum exhibition that focuses on the artist’s lifelong engagement with nature, a more complete and nuanced understanding of his career has emerged. Stella’s work of flora and fauna demonstrate his deep connection to and close observational study of nature to invigorate his creativity and sustain his human spirit. Indeed, nature was a salve to his woes about life and the modern age. He made countless drawings and paintings of flowers, many of which were done at the New York Botanical Garden – a favorite place for the artist. In these works, Stella explored new styles and pressed the limits of his imagination. Like nature itself, he was always changing, always growing. Stella found himself in Barbados in 1937, when then health of his wife had declined and she asked him to bring her home. He loved the island paradise, as it reawakened his creativity and love the natural world, much as his returns to Italy did. Although he remained in Barbados for only five months, the landscape he absorbed and the motifs he developed fueled his art for the next three years. The Barbados paintings...