Joseph Stella
The Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme
1939
On view
Floor 7
Date
1939
Classification
Paintings
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
Overall: 70 1/4 × 42 3/16in. (178.4 × 107.2 cm)
Accession number
42.15
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase
Rights and reproductions
© artist or artist’s estate
To Italian-born Joseph Stella, who immigrated to New York at the age of nineteen, New York City was a nexus of frenetic, form-shattering power. In the engineering marvel of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he first depicted in 1918 and returned to throughout his career, he found a contemporary technological monument that embodied the modern human spirit. Here, Stella portrays the bridge with a linear dynamism borrowed from Italian Futurism. He captures the dizzying height and awesome scale of the bridge from a series of fractured perspectives, combining dramatic views of radiating cables, stone masonry, cityscapes, and night sky. The large scale of the work—it is nearly six feet tall—conjures a Renaissance altar, while the Gothic style of the massive pointed arches evokes medieval churches. By combining contemporary architecture and historical allusions, Stella transformed the Brooklyn Bridge into a twentieth-century symbol of divinity, the quintessence of modern life and the Machine Age.