Joseph Stella

1877–1946

Believing 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 The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme, 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, America.”

Dana Miller and Adam D. Weinberg, Handbook of the Collection (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015), 366.

Wikipedia entry

Introduction

Joseph Stella (born Giuseppe Michele Stella, June 13, 1877 – November 5, 1946) was an Italian-born American Futurist painter best known for his depictions of industrial America, especially his images of the Brooklyn Bridge. He is also associated with the American Precisionist movement of the 1910s–1940s.

Wikidata identifier

Q1347418

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Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed April 25, 2025.

Getty record

Country of birth

Italy

Roles

Artist, collagist, landscapist, painter

ULAN identifier

500032250

Names

Joseph Stella, Giuseppe Stella, Giuseppe Carlo Stella

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Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed April 25, 2025.

On view
Floor 7

First acquired
1931

Date of birth
June 13, 1877

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