About this artist: Joseph Stella

Narrator: Joseph Stella was one of the first American artists to glorify the new technologies of urban modernity in the early decades of the twentieth century. He had immigrated to New York from the Southern Italian mountain town of Muro Lucano. He fell in love with his new surroundings, even calling the city his “wife.” In 1912 he encountered Italian Futurist painting, with its emphasis on modernity’s speed and dynamism, and soon adapted the style for his own purposes. The Brooklyn Bridge, which he painted numerous times between 1917 and 1941, became his most iconic subject.