"The Conversation"

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Joseph Stella
"The Conversation"
Circa 1925

About the Item

Joseph Stella 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, especially his images of the Brooklyn Bridge. He is also associated with the American Precisionist movement of the 1910s–1940s. Stella was born to a middle-class family in Italy, in Muro Lucano, a village in the province of Potenza. His grandfather Antonio and his father Michele were attorneys (NOTAIO), but he came to New York City in 1896 to study medicine, following in the foot steps of his older brother Doctor Antonio Stella. However, he quickly abandoned his medical studies and turned instead to art, studying at the Art Students League and the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase. His first paintings were Rembrandtesque depictions of city slum life. A remarkable draftsman, he made drawings throughout the various phases of his career, beginning as an academic realist with a particular interest in immigrant and ethnic life. From 1905 to 1909, he worked as an illustrator, publishing his realist drawings in magazines. "He prowled the streets, sketch pad and pencil in hand, alert to catch the pose of the moment, the detail of costume or manner that told the story of a life." In 1908, he was commissioned for a series on industrial Pittsburgh, later published in The Pittsburgh Survey. Stella returned to Italy in 1909. He was unhappy with America, writing that he longed to be back in his native land after "an enforced stay among enemies, in a black funereal land over which weighed ... the curse of a merciless climate."[4] It was a well-timed decision. His return to Europe led to his first extensive contact with Modernism which would ultimately mold his distinctive personal style, notable for its strong color and sweeping and dynamic lines. By 1911, he had departed Italy, where the omnipresence of the Renaissance presented its own kind of obstacle for contemporary painters, and relocated to Paris. When he arrived, "Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism were in full swing," he wrote, and "[there] was in the air the glamor of a battle." It was the right place to be, at just the right time, for a man of Stella's curiosity, openness to new trends, and ambition. In Paris, Stella attended the salon of Gertrude Stein, where he met many other painters. "[Stein] found the big and boisterous painter rather like [her friend, the poet] Apollinaire; they both had a fund of sarcastic wit that was frequently turned on their hosts." Stella's view of his hostess was indeed sarcastic: she sat, he wrote, "enthroned on a sofa in the middle of the room," surrounded by her Cezannes and Picassos, "with the forceful solemnity of a pythoness or a sibyl ... in a high and distant pose." Having met Umberto Boccioni and befriended Gino Severini in Europe, he became associated with the Italian Futurists and began to incorporate Futurist principles into his art, though he was also interested in the structural experiments of the Cubists and the dynamic color of the Fauves. Returning to New York in 1913, he was prepared to give the United States a second try. It was a decision he did not regret, although, as art historian Wanda Corn noted, "his culture shock never abated."[8] He became a part of the Alfred Stieglitz and the Walter Arensberg circles in Manhattan and enjoyed a close relationship with fellow expatriate and leader of the New York Dada movement Marcel Duchamp (Stella and Arensberg accompanied Duchamp to the plumbing supply store in 1917 to purchase the infamous urinal. As a result of these associations, he had almost as many opportunities as he had known in Europe to be among kindred spirits and to see advanced new art. In 1913, he painted Battle of Lights, Coney Island, one of the earliest and greatest American Futurist works. The legendary[citation needed] Armory Show of 1913, in which he participated, provided him with greater impetus to experiment with modernist styles. Der Rosenkavalier (1914) and Spring (The Procession -- A Chromatic Sensation) (1914–1916) are vigorous color abstractions. With the Armory Show, Stella also became a much-talked-about figure in the New York art world, an object of virulent attacks from conservative critics who found Modernism threatening and inexplicable and an object of fascination to younger, more adventurous artists. In the view of art historian Sam Hunter, "Among the modern paintings at the Armory Show, Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, Picabia's Procession at Seville, and Stella's Futurist Battle of Lights, Coney Island came to exert the most seminal influence on American painters." A friend noted that the painting "caused a general sensation, an artistic upheaval as sudden and unexpected as it was universal." Collector and art educator Katherine Dreier included Stella among those artists whose work she sought to promote under the auspices of her Societe Anonyme, New York's first museum dedicated exclusively to advanced contemporary art, which opened its doors in 1920. In New York during the 1920s, Stella became fascinated with the geometric quality of the architecture of Lower Manhattan. In these works he further assimilated elements of Cubism and Futurism. In Brooklyn Bridge (1919), he shows his fascination with the sweeping lines of the Roebling's bridge, a motif he used several years before poet Hart Crane turned to this structure as a symbol of modernity. Stella’s depictions of the bridge feature the diagonal cables that sweep downward forcefully, providing directional energy. While these dynamic renderings suggest the excitement and motion of modern life, in Stella’s hands, the image of the bridge also becomes a powerful icon of stability and solidarity. Among his other well-known paintings is New York Interpreted (The Voice of the City) (1922), a five-paneled work (almost twenty-three feet long and over eight feet high) patterned after a religious altarpiece, but depicting bridges and skyscrapers instead of saints. This work reflects the belief, common at the time, that industry was displacing religion as the center of modern life. The painting is in the collection of the Newark Museum. "At a time when virtually all modernists tried their hand at representing the city," Wanda Corn has written, "Stella's painting is the summa." In the 1930s, Stella worked on the Federal Art Project and later traveled to Europe, North Africa, and the West Indies, locations that inspired him to work in various modes. He restlessly moved from one style to the next, from realism to abstraction to surrealism. He executed abstract city themes, religious images, botanical and nature studies, erotic and steamy Caribbean landscapes, and colorful still lifes of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. Stella's works from his post-Armory Show period, however, were problematic for the cultivation of a sustained career. Once he had ceased painting in a Futurist or quasi-Cubist mode and had finished with his period of Precisionist factory images (circa 1920), he was not aligned with any particular movement. His concerns, as well as his approach to painting, became less timely, more personal and idiosyncratic. Tree of Life (1920), like many later Stella works, is "baroque and operatic,"[13] a garden scene out of Bosch, and his figure studies (usually female, often Madonna-like) are decoratively, extravagantly embellished. His numerous floral works border on the surreal but, in their lushness and excess, could not accurately be characterized as a part of the Surrealist movement. Critic Lewis Mumford called him a "puzzling painter" at that point, commenting, "I have seen the fissure between his realism and his fantasy widen into an abyss." Stella's strong draftsmanship is evident in the many different kinds of images he created throughout his life. He is especially respected today for his portraits on paper drawn in silverpoint, or silverpoint and oil, most from the 1920s. His renderings of Walt Whitman, Marcel Duchamp, the artist Louis Eilshemius, and his friend, the composer Edgar Varese, are works of exceptional sensitivity to line, facial detail, and the intellectual aura of the sitter. A lesser-known aspect of Stella's work is the collages he made in the 1920s, consisting of scraps of discarded paper, wrappers (some with the commercial logo or label still visible), and other bits of urban debris, often slashed with brush strokes of paint. Though Stella was "attracted to the grandiose, mechanized aspects of the city, [he] was also drawn to its anonymous, unnoticed discards...the detritus of human existence." These are works in the spirit of the German collage artist Kurt Schwitters and the anti-"high art" ethos of the Dada movement, which always interested Stella. By the late 1930s, Stella's work attracted considerably less attention than it had in previous decades. His truculent personality had alienated many old friends, and his style no longer spoke to the times. "Stella's health and critical fortunes sank in [the years prior to World War II]. Emotionally cut off from the New York art world, even his retrospective at the Newark Museum in 1939 failed to reestablish him. Though successful as a presentation, the show was less enthusiastically reviewed than Stella had anticipated, and he later complained of not being able to induce anyone living in New York City to see it." Diagnosed with heart disease in the early 1940s and subject to increasing periods of morbid anxiety, he succumbed to heart failure in 1946. He is interred in an impressive mausoleum in The Woodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York City. Major Works in Public Collections Battle of Lights, Coney Island (1913): Yale University Art Gallery Der Rosenkavalier (1914): Whitney Museum of American Art Brooklyn Bridge (1919): Yale University Art Gallery New York Interpreted (The Voice of the City) (1920-1922): Newark Museum Factories (1920): Museum of Modern Art By-Product Plants (1923-1926): Chicago Art Institute The Amazon (1925-1926): Baltimore Museum of Art The Virgin (1926): Brooklyn Museum Tree, Cactus, Moon (1927-1928): Reynolda House Museum, North Carolina American Landscape (1929): Walker Art Center Lotus (1929): Hirshhorn Museum Flowers, Italy (1930): Phoenix Art Museum Old Brooklyn Bridge (1941): Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Artist's Gallery

Creator:
Joseph Stella (1877-1946, American, Italian)
Creation Year:
Circa 1925
Dimensions:
Height: 4 in (10.16 cm)Width: 6.25 in (15.88 cm)Depth: 1.25 in (3.18 cm)
Medium:
Color Pencil
Movement & Style:
American Modern
Period:
1920-1929
Condition:
Overall size gallery framed and matted 16.5 by 19 inches.
Gallery Location:
Southampton, NY
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU141577922

Shop All Joseph Stella

Joseph Stella

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 Lucano, a small town in the southern Apennines. 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 19 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).

(Biography provided by Hirschl & Adler)