Joseph Stella

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. □

Stella, Joseph (1877–1946). American painter, born at Muro Lucano, near Naples, Italy. He emigrated to the USA in 1896, and after abandoning medicine as a career he studied from 1897 to 1901 at the Art Students League and the New York School of Art. He was an excellent draughtsman and for several years earned his living as an illustrator. From 1909 to 1912 he lived in Italy and France, where he had his first significant contacts with modern art. He was particularly influenced by Futurism and he became the leading American exponent of the style. His first and most famous Futurist painting was Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (Yale University Art Gallery, 1913–14), a densely fragmented portrayal of a crowded amusement park at night. In such paintings Stella gave a romanticized image of the industrialized townscape of New York. In particular he was obsessed with Brooklyn Bridge, which he described as ‘a shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America’ (Brooklyn Bridge, Yale University Art Gallery, 1917–18).

Stella soon abandoned the Futurist idiom, but industrial and urban themes continued to inspire him. He was active in the administration of two leading avant-garde associations—the Society of Independent Artists and the Société Anonyme—and in the early 1920s he experimented with various styles, including Precisionism. In the 1920s and 1930s he spent much of his time in Italy and France (he lived in Paris 1930–4). From the mid-1920s his work grew more conservative and included mystical and sacred subjects. By the time declining health forced him to give up his studio in 1942 his reputation had faded greatly. David W. Scott (in Britannica Encyclopedia of American Art, 1973) writes of Stella: ‘A man of vivid and mercurial temperament, he worked in the widest variety of styles, but created in the process several pictures that stand as landmarks of modernism in America.’

Stella, Joseph (b Muro Lucano, nr. Potenza, 13 June 1877; d New York, 5 Nov. 1946). Italian-born American painter. He emigrated to the USA in 1896, but from 1909 to 1912 he lived in Italy and France, where he had his first significant contacts with modern art. He was particularly influenced by Futurism and he became the leading American exponent of the style. His first and most famous Futurist painting was Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913–14, Yale Univ. AG), a densely fragmented portrayal of a crowded amusement park at night. In works such as this Stella gave a romanticized image of the industrialized townscape of New York. In particular he was obsessed with Brooklyn Bridge, which he described as ‘a shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America’ (Brooklyn Bridge, 1917–18, Yale Univ. AG). He soon abandoned the Futurist idiom, but industrial and urban themes continued to inspire him. Stella was active in the administration of two leading avant-garde associations—the Society of Independent Artists and the Société Anonyme—and in the early 1920s he experimented with various styles, including Precisionism. In the 1920s and 1930s he spent much of his time in Italy and France (he lived in Paris 1930–4). From the mid-1920s his work grew more conservative and included mystical and sacred subjects.

Stella, Joseph (1877–1946). Italian-born American painter. He emigrated to the USA in 1896, but from 1909 to 1912 he lived in Italy and France, where he had his first significant contacts with modern art. He was particularly influenced by Futurism and he became the leading American exponent of the style. His first and most famous Futurist painting was Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913–14, Yale Univ. AG), a densely fragmented portrayal of a crowded amusement park at night. In works such as this Stella gave a romanticized image of the industrialized townscape of New York. In particular he was obsessed with Brooklyn Bridge, which he described as ‘a shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America’ (Brooklyn Bridge, 1917–18, Yale Univ. AG). He soon abandoned the Futurist idiom, but industrial and urban themes continued to inspire him. Stella was active in the administration of two leading avant-garde associations—the Society of Independent Artists and the Société Anonyme—and in the early 1920s he experimented with various styles, including Precisionism. In the 1920s and 1930s he spent much of his time in Italy and France (he lived in Paris 1930–4). From the mid-1920s his work grew more conservative and included mystical and sacred subjects.

Joseph Stella 1877–1946, American painter, b. Italy, emigrated to the United States in 1896. He studied at the Art Students League of New York City with William Chase and later in Italy and Paris. He is best known for his cubist- and futurist-inspired paintings executed in the years around 1920. These works strikingly expressed the vibrancy and dynamism of life in New York City. The best known of this group is "The Bridge," from the series New York Interpreted (Newark Mus., N.J.). He later turned to more mystical subjects, in paintings notable for their strong color and incisive realism.

Bibliography: See biography by I. B. Jaffe (1970).