JOSEPH STELLA [1877–1946]

Presentation Transcript

Brooklyn Bridge

c. 1919–1920

On June 13, 1877, Giuseppe Michele Stella was born in a mountain village near Naples, Italy.

At the age of 18, he arrived at Ellis Island and assimilated the English version of his name, Joseph Stella.
His older brother, Antonio Stella, had immigrated to New York years earlier, and was a successful physician who hoped his younger brother would follow in his footsteps.

Joseph

Stella

Self-

Portrait

However, after a year at medical school, followed by another year at pharmacy school, Joseph Stella found his true passion - the arts.

While enrolled at the College of Pharmacy, he attended the antique class at the Art Students League in New York.
By the end of his first year of pharmacy school, he had given up on his family’s hopes to becoming a physician.

Instead, he sought after his own dream, and enrolled at the New York School of Art.

There, he was a student of artist William Merritt Chase and was awarded a tuition scholarship for his second year.
Under the influence of Chase’s lectures, Stella began to admire the works of Dutch, German and Flemish masters that were on view at the nearby Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1903, the young Stella soon turned to illustrating subjects of New York’s immigrant population to which he, himself, belonged.

In 1905, Stella’s drawings of immigrants were included in the popular social reform weekly The Outlook.
Soon after, Stella became involved in the immigration issues that were sweeping the nation.
Arguing for the equal treatment of fellow immigrants, he completed commissions for more social reform weeklies, such as the widely distributed Charities and The Commons.

While working as an illustrator, Stella was also making a name for himself as a painter.

In 1906, his painting The Old Man was exhibited at an exhibition of the Society of American Artists in New York.
However, despite success in America, Stella grew homesick for his small hometown of Muro Lucano in Italy.

In 1909, he sailed for Europe, visiting Rome, Florence, Naples, Muro Lucano, and Paris.

During his extended stay in Paris, he witnessed, for the first time, Cubist and Futurist works at the annual exhibition of Salon des Independants.
Influenced by the Italian Futurists, Stella adopted the group’s claims that the modern artist should not look to the past for material; instead, the modern artist must endeavor to express the civilization of his or her own era.

Stella returned to New York in the fall of 1912.

Upon his arrival, he broke away from the traditional styles he had been taught years earlier.
As if to highlight his schism from tradition even more poignantly, two of his paintings were included in the landmark, modern art Armory Show of 1913.
Shortly after, he completed Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras, which since its display at the Montross Gallery in the fall of 1913, has been hailed as the first American Futurist painter.

During the early 1920s, Stella earned a reputation as an important figure in American modern art.

In 1921, he published many lectures on art.
He also acted as a director of the Society of Independent artists and of the Salons of America.
After years as an immigrant in a country that prized him as an artist of their own, Stella finally became a citizen of the United States in 1923.
However, despite his new citizenship, Stella was unable to shake feelings of displacement and homesickness.
During the next ten years of his life, he lived mainly in Europe, only visiting the United States to help plan exhibitions of his work.

In 1934, Stella settled in the Bronx with his wife Mary French Stella.

Over the next decade, his health deteriorated rapidly, and in turn, his reputation as a prolific painter suffered.
At the age of 60, he developed heart disease, and was eventually confined to his bed in 1942.
In the years following, Stella underwent an unsuccessful surgery for thrombosis in his left eye, and he suffered a serious injury from falling down an open elevator shaft.
He died of a heart attack in 1946.

To Joseph Stella and other progressive artists of the early twentieth century, the timeworn conventions of European painting seemed powerless to convey the dynamism of modern life.

An Italian immigrant, Stella arrived in New York City at a time of unprecedented urban growth and social change in America.

He first encountered the new approaches of modernist painting on a trip to Paris and took particular interest in Futurism, an Italian movement that claimed to be “violently revolutionary” in its opposition to the traditions that had prevailed in art ever since the Renaissance.

Upon returning to the United States, Stella himself converted to Futurism, convinced that only its new vision of reality could capture the complexities of the machine age.

In the Brooklyn Bridge, Stella found a subject that impressed him, he said, “as the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America.”

Brooklyn Bridge, his signature image, addressed the two aesthetic currents of his time—representation and abstraction—to suggest the deeper significance of this modern architectural icon.

Stella photographed its various components—the maze of wires and cables, the granite piers and Gothic arches, the pedestrian walkway and subway tunnels, the thrilling prospect of Manhattan skyscrapers—as an abstract pattern of line, form, and color that evokes an idea of the bridge rather than faithfully describing it.

Yet, as one critic observed, Stella’s interpretation seemed “more real, more true than a literal transcription of the bridge could be.”

A “literal transcription” would have represented only its appearance, the impression it left upon Stella’s retina.

A Futurist rendition could also account for more subjective impressions, the physical and psychological sensations it produced on the artist.

The Old Brooklyn Bridge

Stella had been inspired to paint the Brooklyn Bridge by his own intense experience of it late one night as he stood alone on the promenade, listening to the noises peculiar to the modern city:

“the underground tumult of the trains in perpetual motion,” “the shrill sulphurous voice of the trolley wires,” “the strange moanings of appeal from tug boats.”

With its thrusting diagonals and pulsating colors, Brooklyn Bridge is a visual translation of that urban atonality and the artist’s sense of claustrophobia.

The taut cable lines tying the complex composition together seem to represent the psychological tension of the artist’s conflicting emotional states.

Stella felt terrified, “a defenseless prey to the surrounding swarming darkness—crushed by the mountainous black impenetrability of the skyscrapers”;

At the same time, he felt spiritually uplifted, “as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new divinity.”

In this Futurist interpretation, the pointed arches of the bridge are open to the sky like the ruins of a Gothic cathedral, and the allusions to stained-glass windows suggest his spiritual epiphany.

More subtly, Brooklyn Bridge recalls a touchstone of Stella’s native culture:

The medieval Italian poet Dante’s spiritual journey from hell to heaven in The Divine Comedy.

“To render more pungent the mystery of my metallic apparition,” Stella explained, “…I excavated here and there caves as subterranean passages to infernal recesses.”

The rounded arch of a subway tunnel, red with the hellish glare of a signal light, occupies the inferno in the center of the painting.

Just above it, a foreshortened view of the promenade where Stella stood makes a comparatively short link between the terrors of the underworld and the radiance of the heavens.

The forces of movement in the painting converge at the top “in a superb assertion of their powers” to the status of divinity.

A third tower (in reality, the bridge has only two) stands at the pinnacle of the pyramid, lit up like a movie marquee by the rushing cables, “the dynamic pillars,” as Stella described them, of the composition.

For Stella, the Brooklyn Bridge—with its noises and tremors and terrors and comforts—represented a spiritual passage to redemption, a visual way of showing transcendence in a secular world.

Find These Elements….

Towers of the Brooklyn Bridge
Traffic signal light
Bridge cables

Take a Closer look….

What time of day is it?
Are there any cars on the bridge?

Turn the painting upside down

Does the picture seem top heavy or bottom heavy?
Why?

The shapes are larger on the top and the forms are thinner on the bottom. The cable lines also are directed to the bottom center and seem to disappear.

Turn the painting right side up again

What are the thin upright forms at the top?
Do some objects seem close and others far away? Why?

They are tall buildings: a city skyline.

The thin white buildings seem farther away because they are placed higher in the painting and are smaller than the traffic light at the bottom.
The cables also get smaller and several angle toward each other as though they were parallel lines converging in the distance.

Take a Closer Look….

How does Stella suggest the complexity of the modern machine era?
How has he indicated its dynamic movement?

He jumbles the thick and thin lines, showing bits and pieces of forms as though they are glimpsed only briefly; he blurs the colors and adds diagonal and curving lines that suggest movement.