{"data":{"id":"1281","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":1281,"topgoose_id":771,"tms_id":1281,"display_name":"Joseph Stella","sort_name":"Stella Joseph","display_date":"1877–1946","begin_date":"1877","end_date":"1946","biography":"\u003cp\u003eBelieving that an artist should “not confine himself to any schools or representation,” Joseph Stella engaged in parallel experiments with a lyrical, symbolic style of abstraction and a bold geometric aesthetic inspired by modern industry. After encountering the Futurist artists of his native Italy (he emigrated to New York at the age of nineteen), Stella sought to use their faceted and planar imagery to capture the technological marvels of his adopted country. He turned to an icon of American engineering: the Brooklyn Bridge. For Stella, as for many other artists in the early twentieth century, the bridge epitomized the confluence of American cultural and industrial achievement. He first depicted the structure in 1918 and returned to it throughout his career. In \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/2968\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e, painted in the final years of his life, Stella portrays the bridge as a modern-day altar, using crisp geometries to instill the structure with solidity and dynamism. The image’s massive upper section represents the bridge’s soaring cables and majestic Gothic arches in a jewel-toned palette that evokes the impression of light filtering through a stained-glass window. The work’s horizontal lower portion, which contains a miniature panoramic view of the bridge and the city skyline, is reminiscent of the predella format of Renaissance altarpieces. Indeed, Stella perceived the bridge as a potent spiritual symbol—it was, for him, a “shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization, \u003cem\u003eAmerica\u003c/em\u003e.”\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan class=\"gray\"\u003eDana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg,\u0026nbsp;\u003ca href=\"https://shop.whitney.org/products/whitney-handbook-of-the-collection\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eHandbook of the Collection\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 366.\u003c/span\u003e\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":true,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500032250","wikidata_id":"Q1347418","created_at":"2017-08-30T15:51:11.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-10T07:02:06.440-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/1281/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/1281/exhibitions"}}}}