Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature

Oil on canvas
Collection of the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, gift of the T. B. Walker Foundation, 1957, 1957.15

Stella captures the pulsing, nocturnal energy of New York in this 1929 rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge. He made at least six major works featuring this subject—the first, in 1919, a massive composition that dazzled audiences with its fractured nocturnal cityscape and pulsing web of cables centered on a road leading to the distant metropolis. Equally commanding in its scale, this later version features an oblique view, with the city virtually walled off by the cables and structure of the bridge. He painted this picture from memory while in Paris to include in his first exhibition there.

Etching on paper
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, gift of Carl and Marian Mullis, 1995.158

Stella’s fascination with trees began early in his career and lasted through his final compositions. This etching shows one of his earliest attempts to represent the large and knobby features of a trunk while leaving out the rest of the tree, a vantage point he would adopt time and again in his tree paintings.

Oil on canvas
Art Bridges, purchase, AB.2018.21

Flora and fauna fill every inch of this massive canvas, alongside symbols of personal significance to Stella. Vignettes from his hometown in Italy, references to Old Master paintings, and architectural structures reminiscent of a garden conservatory emerge as details amid plants, fruits, flowers, and birds. The clear blue sky—a recurring feature of Stella’s later nature-based works—filters through a glorious orb cradled within the tree’s uppermost branches. In the gnarled tree itself, thought to be an ancient olive native to Stella’s region of Italy, he inserts himself: a heavyset, larger-than-life man who spans both worlds, the old and the new, emboldened and embraced by nature.

Oil on canvas
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, gift of Stephen C. Clark, 1954.21

Although the subject appears to be a mythical specimen, the exquisite lyrebird depicted in this painting is a songbird native to Australia. Under threat of extinction, the exotic bird aroused great interest in the early 1900s and was widely visible in scientific publications and newspaper articles alike. Stella may have encountered it through illustrations and taxidermized specimens in natural history museums. Although his attraction to this unusual creature may have been its fascinating plume, the bird is also capable of remarkable vocal mimicry, a characteristic that—as an artist inspired by all the senses—must also have intrigued Stella.

Oil on canvas
High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Harriet and Elliott Goldstein and High Museum of Art Enhancement Fund, 2000.206

Purissima is among Stella’s most striking religious paintings. Standing nearly life size, like an altarpiece, the figure recalls spiritual paintings found in churches across Italy as well as sculptural effigies of the Madonna, often adorned with flowers and fruit and paraded through the streets in religious processions. Here the Madonna is part Christian icon and part goddess of nature—the soaring stems of the pink lilies delineate a celestial throne, a common feature in traditional imagery, while the stamen of the central flower suggests the Virgin’s crown. Flanking her on either side are Mount Vesuvius and the outline of Capri, landmarks of the Bay of Naples.

Oil on canvas
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, Bebe and Crosby Kemper Collection, gift of the Enid and Crosby Kemper Foundation, 2003.03.01

Here Stella assembles a classical temple of flora and fauna—in his own words, culled “from the elysian lyricism of the Italian spring.” Flowers rise from a pink lotus at the base of a central column, culminating in the curious combination of a lupine and a longhorn steer’s head flower, a floral form that resembles a bull’s skull. Below perch three sparrows, the national bird of Italy and a favorite of Stella’s.

Oil on canvas
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2006.102

Red Flower is one of a group of works Stella made in Paris in 1929 that take on an overall darker tone. New York Times critic Edward Alden Jewell characterized the picture as “eerie,” noting, “the artist mixes his paint with mysterious ingredients known only to alchemists. He has learned how to make color glow through dark, opaque forms.” The amaryllis in Red Flower materializes out of the blackness as if by magic, with leaves and petals splayed and two birds framing the central form, evoking religious paintings of apostles flanking Christ on the cross.

Collage (leaf and paper) on paper
Courtesy of Kraushaar Galleries, New York

Stella made some sixty-five collages over the course of three decades, a collection of largely untitled compositions he referred to in Italian as macchine naturali—or “natural machines.” The term itself combines the two concepts, the humanmade and the natural, into a single composition. Assembled of found objects, many include botanical elements such as branches or leaves. Though Stella never exhibited his collages publicly, the whimsy and freedom he expresses in these compositions may have informed his work in other media.

Photograph of Joseph Stella seated in a chair, undated, Joseph Stella Papers, 1905–1970, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.