JOSEPH STELLA

 

 Post 172 -by Gautam Shah

 
SUNDAY Feature on ART of Architecture

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Joseph Stella (Giuseppe Michele Stella, 1877-1946) was an Italian-born, who migrated to America. He was a modernist, futurist cubist and a precisionists painter. He was very versatile and imaginative, idiosyncratic, with contradictions and incongruities, that perhaps the reason for loss of friends and clients.

He depicted the city architecture, modern industrial culture and occasionally religious themes, all with bold colours, often romantic and organic lines. His early works of NY capture the vibrancy and dynamism of the urban life. Stella's paintings are varied in styles and mediums, like charcoal, gouache and pastels and oils. He painted different moods, from romantic and impressionistic, mysterious and tonalist and divinity in chaos. He turned dull industrial scenes into elegant landscapes where the compositions remained dark and abstract.

By 1910, Stella was back in Europe, visiting Rome, Florence, Naples, Muro Lucano, and Paris, enriching his exposure and style. He broke away from the traditional styles of earlier period and began to exploit massing of dark and lights, for abstract forms set against industrial skies. His city scapes reflected his varying moods, stark, mysterious, as well as impressionistic. His charcoal compositions reflect the tonalist influence of BW photography of the times. He became interested in the geometric lines of Manhattan architecture.

Stella first painted the Brooklyn Bridge in 1918 and returned to it repeatedly throughout his career. The bridge represented the spiritual significance of modernity but with an allusion to gothic architecture.

Lewis Mumford, called him a ‘puzzling painter, -I have seen the fissure between his realism and his fantasy widen into an abyss’. Art historian Abraham A. Davidson has called ‘the detritus of human existence’, into something beautiful and precious. Art curators find it difficult to place him in any class.

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