Born June 13, 1877 in an Italian village just outside of Naples, artist Joseph Stella came to the United States at age eighteen to study pharmacology and medicine. Within a year, however, Stella had enrolled in New York’s Art Students’ League, taking lessons from the well-known painter and teacher William Merritt Chase.
The Immigrant Artist
Stella was also taught by Robert Henri, founding member of The Ash Can School. “Ash Can” painters focused on the gritty beauty of New York’s rougher neighborhoods, asserting that such subjects were as valid as any aesthetically perfect scene.
Stella was soon hired by reform journals to illustrate articles about the struggle of laborers and immigrants to obtain decent wages and standards of living, especially the Italian immigrants whom Stella knew so well. In 1906, one of Stella’s paintings was exhibited at the Society of American Artists in New York, and his reputation was clearly growing. He missed Naples, though, and made a trip home a few years later.
Futurist Influences
Stella visited his family and went on to Rome and Florence, then detoured to Paris, enjoying the café society and taking in the new and exciting atmosphere of Cubist and Futurist works. Stella’s fellow Italian countrymen were Futurists Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Gino Severini and Carlo Carrà, who did not see the world in a classic or realistic manner, but more in kaleidoscopic or chaotic rushes.
The multimedia Futurists were intent on incorporating the concept of the machine into their work, particularly the automobile and the visual effects it produced through speed. The Futurists impressed upon Stella the idea that artists should no longer be influenced by past subjects or styles, but that only the present and things to come truly mattered.
Returning to New York in 1912, Stella exhibited at the groundbreaking Armory Show, then applied his recent Futurist influences to the 1913 painting Battle of Lights, Coney Island, portraying the energy of the celebrated amusement park in a new and pulsating manner. He would continue in this vein, adapting the style in a more precise manner to his 1920 The Bridge (Brooklyn Bridge), depicting another American landmark in a dazzling display of shape and color.
Later Work and Legacy
Stella had become a respected artist in the United States and exhibited and lectured frequently. He continued to paint the modern American landscape with its stunning skyscrapers and huge factories, and he would complete another version of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1939.
Although he became an official U.S. citizen in 1923, Stella tended to feel restless and displaced. He visited Europe for long spans of time, and made trips to North Africa and Barbados. The vivid, dream-like influence of more exotic environments can be seen in his work of the time. He was also artistically restless, always looking for a fresh challenge. As Stella himself declared:
From 1921 on I was swinging as a pendulum from one subject to the opposite...I complied without any reserve with every genuine appeal to my artistic faculties....
Stella’s fascination with styles and his skill with various media make him difficult to categorize. While often labeled the first American Futurist, his work also displays Surrealist, Fauve, collagist and classical tendencies – and perhaps that makes him a quintessentially American immigrant artist, showing how diversity and adaptability can create new forms and visions.
Joseph Stella died in 1946. His range of work can be seen throughout the U.S., including The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Smithsonian and The Newark Museum. Battle of Lights, Coney Island is on display at The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska – Lincoln.
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