Joseph Stella [Paperback]

Barbara Haskell (Author), Joseph Stella (Author), Whitney Museum of American Art (Corporate Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 087427091X | ISBN-13: 978-0874270914 | Publication Date: July 1994 | Edition: 1ST

Joseph Stella (1877-1946) is best known for his Futurist-inspired paintings of New York, especially those of the Brooklyn Bridge, which remain symbols of the machine age in America. This book accompanies the first museum retrospective devoted to Stella in more than 30 years.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

While the Whitney Museum's more avant-garde exhibitions have come in for a good deal of criticism recently, their shows of established modern masters regularly display intellectual acuity. In this work, the catalog for a recent exhibition at the Whitney, Haskell goes beyond the best-known works of a painter whose artistic appeal is proving as durable as the Brooklyn Bridge he celebrated. Haskell's scholarship is investigative in its tone and illuminating in its revelations. Because there have been remarkably few publications on this important American artist, this catalog doubles as a significant survey of Stella's entire "oeuvre," including book and journal illustrations. Haskell is effective in explaining Stella's place in modern art and showing that the painter's involvement in Futurism was a step along a road of visual exploration that encompassed many viewpoints. Complete with good-quality illustrations and the requisite chronology and exhibition history, this book is a worthy acquisition for academic art collections and those building strengths in 20th-century modernism.
Paula A. Baxter, NYPL
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

Acclaimed as America's most important futurist, the Italian immigrant Joseph Stella (1877-1946) was one of the first artists to fuse European vanguard tenets with twentieth-century American subjects. His modernist depictions of New York--especially those of the Brooklyn Bridge--are quintessential emblems of the machine age and American industrial genius and prowess. Inspired by the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman, Stella imbued these works, produced between 1913 and 1922, with spiritual significance, transforming bridges and skyscrapers into icons of the modern world.

Until recently, scholars have focused primarily on these images. Yet prior to his appropriation of modernism, Stella produced moving portraits of immigrants and industrial workers, often in his capacity as an illustrator for various social and labor-reform journals. And in 1922 he turned his back on the avant-garde themes that had made him famous. From this moment until his death in 1964, he created instead a masterful body of symbolic and metaphoric landscapes and portraits as well as richly colored still lifes and religious images. This profusely illustrated monograph and the Whitney Museum exhibition it accompanies represent the first comprehensive analysis of Stella's work in twenty-five years, the first to analyze the full range of his achievement. In an era in which modernist hegemony is being called into question, Stella emerges as a powerful figure--more complex, challenging, and commanding than he has ever appeared before.

Barbara Haskell, curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, has organized numerous exhibitions and is the author of a number of monographs and catalogues, including Milton Avery, Ralston Crawford, Charles Demuth, Burgoyne Diller, Marsden Hartley, and Agnes Martin. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 278 pages
• Publisher: Whitney Museum of Art; 1ST edition (July 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 087427091X
• ISBN-13: 978-0874270914
• Product Dimensions: 11.7 x 8.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,041,877 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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