“Joseph Stella” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
April 22–October 9, 1994
Joseph Stella (1877–1946) has long occupied a secure place in the ranks of the first generation of American modernists. His period of residence in Paris in 1911–12 gave him firsthand access to the art and ideas of the European avant-garde in the halcyon years of its development, and his association with the artists and patrons of the New York Dada group—Marcel Duchamp, Walter and Louise Arensberg, et al.—placed him in the company of the American avant-garde as well. Above all, his celebrated paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge, produced in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, have long enjoyed an iconic status in the American art of this century.
Yet Stella’s has always been a difficult career to keep in focus, and not only because of his frequent shifts in style. The contradictory character of his own temperament was a source of bedevilment in his lifetime, and has continued to be a source of confusion for his posterity. In the work of no other American artist of his generation are there such flagrant contrasts of taste and standards to be observed. Stella was a man of large passions and absolute convictions, but the object of those passions often underwent sudden changes and the focus of his convictions was similarly volatile. In neither his peripatetic life nor his many-sided art did he ever find it possible to follow a steady course.