Joseph Stella, American born Italy, 1877-1946

from an exhibition in 2023 at the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

Born in the small southern Italian mountain town of Muro Locano, Joseph Stella arrived at 18 in the New York where his brother was already a successful doctor.  He became an illustrator after graduating and then returned to Italy in 1908. 

 

Exposed in Paris to the work of Symbolists, Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists  he returned from there to New York in 1912.

 

 

 

Brooklyn Bridge, 1919-20, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Yale University Art Gallery.  Photo from the net.

 

 

 

Joseph Stella’s closest artistic relationship in New York was with Marcel Duchamp.  He was much affected and excited by the work of other European artists who also exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show:  Henri Matisse, Robert Delaunay, Edvard Munch and Pablo Picasso.

 

 

 

Voice of the City of New York Interpreted (Voice of the City), 1921-1922

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American.  Newark Museum of  Art, NJ

 

5 panels almost 23 feet long and more than 8 feet high.  With the look of an altar, this work reflects the displacement of religion as the center of life by industry.

 

From 1913 onwards, Stella turned himself to the depiction of modern, urban life often using the fragmented focus of Futurism.

 

 

 

The Brooklyn Bridge (Variation on an Old Theme), 1939, oil on canvas.

  Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American.  Whitney Museum of (North) American Art, NY

 

 

It is for this association with the modernist tradition that he is best remembered. He has been categorized with the artists who nudged art from Realism to the Abstract Expressionism which took hold in New York at the end of his life. 

 

These depictions of industrial and urban life made Stella famous.

 

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Stella’s paintings and drawings of nature, however, were, by far, the greater part of his oeuvre. 

 

He came to associate his emotional and spiritual health with the natural world.

 

Even if he loved the energy of New York, he was ambiguous about the experience of industrial life: vast and impenetrable structures, gloom, darkness.

 

The skyscrapers, he said, were “a monstrous dream…like bandages covering the sky, stifling our breath.”

 

He made a tree, which he found growing in a waste patch of ground near a factory in Brooklyn, the focal point of the painting below.  He thought of this painting as a pendant for his famous painting above of 1919-20 of Brooklyn Bridge.

 

 

Reproduction of Tree of My Life, 1919. 

The original, too large to enter into this museum’s galleries, is oil on canvas.  The original is privately owned.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. 

 

 

He thought of the tree as an omen of good fortune, thriving in the city and despite the city.  That is what he wanted for himself.

 

The painting itself is a dreamscape memory of Italy.

 

Not only did Joseph Stella associate nature with his own wellbeing, but this nature was specific to  a place:  the southern Italy of his formative years.

   

He enriched his memory of southern Italy with the flora of the tropics which he came to know at the New York Botanical Garden and in his travels in North Africa and Barbados.

 

 

 

 

Swans (Night), 1917, pastel on paper.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by Adelson Galleries to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

His birthplace remained the source of his inspiration.

 

“Italy,” he wrote in 1928,  “is my only true inspiration….Despite everything, thirty years and more of America have succeeded in making more solid and firm the Latin structure of my nature.”

 

 

 

 

Gardenia, c. 1919; silverpoint and coloured pencil on paper.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

The nature he knew in New York was in contained gardens or in desultory spaces between buildings  or along the edge of sidewalks.  In Italy were his vast vistas, his Mount Vesuvius, his Bay of Naples, his Capri, his immense Mediterranean sunlight; and most of all:  his flowers. 

 

All of these he fantasized and incorporated into his work on natural forms.

 

 

 

The Peacock, 1919, pastel on paper.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the Norton Museum of Art to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

The artist returned frequently to Italy after WW1 and stayed sometimes for three or four years.

 

 

 

photo from the website of the Brandywine River Museum

Tropical Flower, 1920, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private collection loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

 

Aquatic Life (Goldfish), 1919-22; pastel on paper.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the American University Museum, Washington, DC to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 

 

 

 

Tropical Sonata, 1920-21, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

French Lilies, 1920’s, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the Newark Museum of Art to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

Two Wood Ducks on a Flowering Branch, 1920-25, pencil, crayon and coloured pencil on paper.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

Still Life, undated, oil on linen.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

 

The Water Lily, c. 1924, oil on glass.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private collection loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 

 

 

 

 

The Swan, c. 1924, oil on canvas. 

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy.  Private collection on exhibition to the Philadelphia Art Museum in a year past

 

 

 

 

Dance of Spring (Song of the Birds), 1924, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

The sparrow is the national bird of Italy.

 

 

In this pictorial identification with his native country, Joseph Stella also incorporated mythical themes.  

 

 

 

 

Undine, 1924-25, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private collection loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

Undine is a water nymph whose life is brought to an end when, falling in love with a human man, she transforms into a woman.

 

 

 

 

The Heron, 1925, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private collection loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

 

Lyre Bird, 1925, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the Phillips Academy, Andover, MA to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

The bird is a native of Australia in whom there was much interest at the time of this painting.

 

 

 

 

Fountain, 1929, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

 

Palm Tree and Bird, 1927-28, oil on canvas. 

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

 

photo from the net

Tree, Cactus, Moon, c. 1928; gouache on paper.  

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 

 

 

 

 

Untitled (The Croton), undated; pastel on paper.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private collection loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

 

Red Flower, 1929, oil on canvas. 

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK loan to the Brandywine Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, PA from whose website this photo

 

 

 

 

Neapolitan Song, 1929, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the Smithsonian Art Museum, Washington, DC to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

The Lotus, 1930

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington,  DE to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

 

Apple, Acorn Squash and Leaf, 1930, pastel on paper.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

 

Flowers, Italy, 1931, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the Phoenix Art Museum to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

 

White Swan with Flower, 1934; silverpoint, crayon, and opaque watercolour on wove paper prepared with white ground.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the Philadelphia Art Museum to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

Raised a Roman Catholic but not active in adulthood, Stella also addressed the Virgin Mary: the most represented image in the Western tradition.

 

 

 

The Virgin, 1926, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

 

The Virgin (Virgin of the Rose and Lily), 1926, oil on canvas. 

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private collection loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

The critics did not identify with Stella’s depictions of a fantastical natural world. 

 

It has taken 75 years after the artist’s death for any museum to organize an exhibition of this nature work despite the fact that it comprises 70% of the artist’s oeuvre.

 

This representation of nature as sole or primary subject does not fit the trajectory of modern art as defined by the Artistic Powers that Be.

 

 

 

Purissima, 1927, oil on canvas

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

This art borrows from Symbolism.  But it is not realism or surrealism. It is not botanical illustration. It does not fall within the boundaries of Impressionism or abstraction. 

 

What this seems to be is the development of a personal idiom by an artist, immigrant to the New World from the Old, to try for equanimity between his two worlds.

 

To have his real and imagined Italy –

the belvedere views of distant glittering water from the heights of Muro Locano;  Italy’s flowers, its churches, its piety, its stories, its apparent unchangingness –

always with him in the immense and alien machine and infernal din which is New York.

 

 

 

Capri, 1926-29, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private collection loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

I  found moving this transmuting of the memory, longing and imagination of a migrant under compulsion to find emotional safety and psychological wholeness.

Irrespective of the opinion of his peers.

 

 

The artist himself, after a slump in interest in his work towards the end of his life, found himself revived when he travelled with his wife (May Geraldine French, 1882-1939) to her native Barbados. 

 

 

 

Joy of Living, oil on canvas, 1940.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Loan by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

The museum points to early Renaissance female portraitures to explain the format of this painting.

The museum also acknowledged that the caricature of this kind of portraiture of a person of colour is a practice today widely decried. 

 

 

Despite social upheaval and colonial repression in Barbados at this time, the artist’s focus was on the light, colour, and natural forms.

 

 

 

Banyan Tree, c. 1938; oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private collection loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

Approaching the island by  sea, he wrote in his notes:

“There resounds once more the song of Hope and Joy….our artistic powers arise, magically awakened in the presence of unexpected natural wonders, ready for the highest flights.”

 

 

 

Palms, 1938, oil on canvas.

Joseph Stella, 1877-1946, American born Italy. Private collection loan to the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

 

 

 

The artist died in Brooklyn, NY just as the Abstract Expressionists of the New York School were taking off to proclaim the North American way.