JOSEPH STELLA [1877

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JOSEPH STELLA 18771946

• Brooklyn Bridge
• c. 19191920

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• 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.

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• Joseph
• Stella
• Self-
• Portrait

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• 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 familys hopes to becoming
  a physician.

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• 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 Chases lectures, Stella
  began to admire the works of Dutch, German and
  Flemish masters that were on view at the nearby
  Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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• In 1903, the young Stella soon turned to
  illustrating subjects of New Yorks immigrant
  population to which he, himself, belonged.
• In 1905, Stellas 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.

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• 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.

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• 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 groups 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• 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.

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• Brooklyn Bridge, his signature image, addressed
  the two aesthetic currents of his
  timerepresentation and abstractionto suggest
  the deeper significance of this modern
  architectural icon.

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

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• Yet, as one critic observed, Stellas
  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
  Stellas retina.

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

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The Old Brooklyn Bridge

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• 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.

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• With its thrusting diagonals and pulsating
  colors, Brooklyn Bridge is a visual translation
  of that urban atonality and the artists sense of
  claustrophobia.
• The taut cable lines tying the complex
  composition together seem to represent the
  psychological tension of the artists conflicting
  emotional states.

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• Stella felt terrified, a defenseless prey to the
  surrounding swarming darknesscrushed 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.

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• 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.

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• More subtly, Brooklyn Bridge recalls a touchstone
  of Stellas native culture
• The medieval Italian poet Dantes spiritual
  journey from hell to heaven in The Divine Comedy.

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

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• 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.

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

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• 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.

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• For Stella, the Brooklyn Bridgewith its noises
  and tremors and terrors and comfortsrepresented
  a spiritual passage to redemption, a visual way
  of showing transcendence in a secular world.

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Find These Elements.

• Towers of the Brooklyn Bridge
• Traffic signal light
• Bridge cables

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Take a Closer look.

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

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Turn the painting upside down

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

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• 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.

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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?

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• 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.

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Take a Closer Look.

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

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• 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.

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• Look for some vertical lines in this painting.
• How do they affect the dynamics of the
  composition?

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• The lines give some order to the chaos.

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• Imagine what Stella heard as he stood on this
  bridge at night.

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• The bridge is over a river.
• He might have heard tugboat horns,
• sirens,
• subway trains, and
• cars and trucks rumbling over the bridge.

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Essay Question 1

• What do you think Joseph Stella found fascinating
  about the bridge?
• Consider
• the bridges size
• What he may have seen while driving over it
  during the day or at night
• Its Urban setting
• Was it peaceful or frightening?

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