Joseph Stella
Joseph Stella Flower Study

Name: Joseph Stella Flower Study
Brand: Joseph Stella
Price: 10500 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Joseph Stella (1877-1946, American, Italian) "Flower Study". Crayon and pencil on paper. Signed lower left. Image 6 7/8” x 4 /34”. Framed 12 1/2” x 10”. Gallery label Beadleston Gallery N.Y. N.Y. Joseph Stella (American, June 13, 1877–November 5, 1946) was a Futurist painter known for his association with the American Precisionism movement and his works depicting industrial America. Stella was born in Lucano, Italy. In 1896, he relocated to New York, NY, to study medicine. After becoming interested in art, Stella left his medical studies and began to study art at the Art Students League of New York. While there, he studied under William Merritt Chase. During this time, Stella's early works featured a Rembrandt style and depicted scenes from city slum life. Between the years of 1905 and 1909, Stella was employed as an illustrator. He was commissioned to paint a series based on industrial Pittsburgh in 1908. While visiting Italy in 1909, Stella was exposed to Modernism for the first time. This exposure would later heavily influence his unique personal style. He also became associated with several Italian Futurist artists during this time. In 1913, Stella returned to New York and painted several works, including Mardi Gras, Battle of Lights, and Coney Island. He also participated in the New York Armory Show of 1913. From Artnet; During the 1920s, Stella became interested in the geometric lines reflected in the architecture of Lower Manhattan. In the works he produced during this time, Stella combined the elements of Futurism and Cubism. His most famous work, featuring the Brooklyn Bridge, was produced during this time. Another well-known work produced in this period is New York Interpreted. Comprised of five panels, this work depicts various skyscrapers and bridges. The work reflects a popular concept of the time that industry would eventually take the place of religion in modern life. In the 1930s, Stella traveled throughout the world and was inspired by such locations as North Africa and the West Indies. During this time, Stella utilized a variety of styles, including Realism, Surrealism, and Abstraction. These works included religious themes, city themes, nature and botanical studies, and Caribbean landscapes. The artist died on November 5, 1946.

Creator:

Joseph Stella (1877-1946, American, Italian)

Dimensions:

Height: 12.5 in (31.75 cm)Width: 10 in (25.4 cm)Depth: 1 in (2.54 cm)

Medium:

Crayon,Pencil

Movement & Style:

American Modern

Period:

20th Century

Condition:

Beautiful estate condition. Minor fading of paper.

Gallery Location:

Norwood, NJ

Reference Number:

1stDibs: LU2584213420802

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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)