joseph stella – ultrawolvesunderthefullmoon

Henry Ernest Schnakenberg, “Indians Trading with the Half Moon”, 1941, One of Four Fresco Murals, Post Office Fort Lee, NewJersey

Born at New Brighton, Staten Island, New York in September of 1892, Henry Ernest Schnakenberg was an American realist painter and etcher known primarily for his renderings of New York’s Central Park and other cityscapes. He began his art studies with evening classes at the Arts Student League in 1913. Schnakenberg’s experience of attending the 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art at the city’s 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington Avenue, known now as the Armory Show, solidified his desire to be an artist. After that exposure, he began full-time classes at the League, that continued as three years of study under painter and printmaker Kenneth Hayes Miller.

After exhibiting two works at the Society of Independent Artists, Schnakenberg enlisted in the Army Medical Corps in 1917 at America’s entry into World War I. Discharged in 1919, he quickly returned to art, exhibiting alongside Joseph Stella at the Whitney Studio Club. Beginning in 1923, Schnakenberg taught for two years at the Art Students League and, later, became the League’s president in 1932. In addition to his teaching, he wrote essays and reviews throughout his career for art magazines.

Henry Schnakenberg regularly exhibited his work at the Society of Independent Artists as well as museum invitationals, including those at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He participated in the Carnegie International from 1920 to 1949 and exhibited alongside his mentor Kenneth Miller at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Beginning in 1932, Schnakenberg was represented by New York’s C.W. Kraushaar Galleries.

After completing mural commissions from the Treasury Department’s section of Fine Arts for post offices in Amsterdam, New York and Fort Lee, New Jersey, Schnakenberg relocated to Newtown, Connecticut. He would travel from there to paint the summer landscapes of Vermont and New England farmlands. A member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, Henry Ernest Schnakenberg died at the age of seventy-eight in October of 1970 at Newtown. His body in interred at the Moravian Cemetery in New Dorp, New York.

Bottom Insert Image: Henry Ernest Schnakenberg, “Air Plants, Puerto Rico”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 77.2 x 92.1 cm, Whitney Museum of American Art, new York

Joseph Stella, “The Virgin”, 1926, Oil on Canvas, 100.8 x 98.4 cm, Brooklyn Museum, New York

Joseph Stella, “Purissima”, 1927, Oil on Canvas, 193 x 145 cm, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia

Born in Muro Lucano, Italy, in 1877, Joseph Stella came to the United States at the age of nineteen to study medicine. He soon, however, abandoned his medical studies and entered the New York School of Art, studying with painter and teacher William Merritt Chase. A remarkable draftsman, Stella worked from 1905 to 1909 as an illustrator, publishing drawings in magazine periodicals. He continued expressing himself in drawings throughout the different phases of his career.

Beginning his career as a Realist, Stella made a visit to Italy in 1909, and associated with artists involved in the Italian Futurism and Modernism art movements. He traveled to Paris in 1911 , often attending Gertrude Stein’s salon and meeting artists there. Stella began to incorporate Futurist principles into his artwork; however, he was also interested in the structure of the Cubists and the dynamic color of the Fauvists..

In January 1913, just after his return to New York from Paris, Stella submitted five works to the Armory Show’s Domestic Committee for possible inclusion in the February exhibition; they selected his oil on canvas “Still Life”. In New York during the 1920s Stella, fascinated with the geometric architecture, assimilated the elements of Cubism and Futurism in his works, an example of which is his “Brooklyn Bridge” with its sweeping diagonal cables. Working for the Federal Art Project, a WPA project in the 1930s, he traveled extensively around the world, painting through a series of styles from realism to abstraction to surrealism.

By the late 1930s, Stella’s work attracted less attention than it had in the past decades, his style no longer relevant to the time. He became emotionally cut off from the New York art world. Stella’s 1939 retrospective exhibition at the Newark Museum, though successful as a presentation, was less enthusiastically reviewed than expected. Diagnosed with heart disease in the early 1940s, subject to periods of anxiety, Joseph Stella succumbed to heart failure in November of 1946.

At the same time that Stella was painting his Italian Futurist works, he was also working in pastel colors producing works with stylized birds and landscapes with long, curvilinear rhythms and sharp silhouettes. It was from this style that Stella developed his Madonna paintings in the 1920s. His paintings, “The Virgin” and “Purissima”, with their naturalistic faces and totally stylized figures, are part of that series. These complex allegorical and religious works, with elaborate floral motifs, demonstrate Stella’s devotion to 15th century Italian painting and familiarity with the aesthetics of Catholic rituals.