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.