JOSEPH STELLA: VISIONARY NATURE

June 17–September 24, 2023

Coming this June to the Brandywine is an extraordinary exhibition of the work of pioneering American modernist Joseph Stella (1877–1946). Co-organized by the Brandywine Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature is the first major museum exhibition of the artist’s work since 1994 and the first to examine in-depth his exquisite nature-based works. It will feature more than 80 paintings and works on paper revealing the artist’s complex response to the spiritual qualities he felt in nature.

Stella is best known for the series of dynamic, Futurist-inspired paintings that launched his career, scenes of New York— specifically the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island—created between 1913-1920. As this exhibition will reveal, he also created exuberant depictions of organic form for over three decades. His subjects included bold, stylized compositions featuring exotic plants and birds, religious works incorporating elaborate floral motifs, and tropical fantasies inspired by visits to North Africa and Barbados. Stella experimented with media ranging from silverpoint to watercolor to painting. His close observation and spiritual responses to nature shaped a poetically transcendent body of work that combines elements of realism and fantasy.

Born in a small town in southern Italy, Stella immigrated to New York in 1896. By 1914, he was already establishing a reputation as a leading avant-garde artist whose work conveyed the energy of the city and modern life. But by 1919, Stella was turning away from urban imagery towards forms found in nature. His extended and impassioned embrace of nature as a subject offered a form of respite and spiritual renewal from the visceral discomfort he often experienced living in New York. While the city remained Stella’s home for the rest of his life, he traveled widely and frequently, in particular to Italy.

Visionary Nature begins with works that demonstrate Stella’s exposure—in a pivotal trip to Paris in 1912—to the artistic strategies of Cubism, Futurism and Dada art. His earliest nature-based subjects appear here, and show the artist experimenting with prismatic color, creating luminous floral paintings on glass, and employing natural materials like leaves and tree bark in innovative collages. Also on view are

Page 10: Joseph Stella, Purissima, 1927, oil on canvas, 76 x 57 in. High Museum of Art, Atlanta, purchase with funds from Harriet and Elliott Goldstein and High Museum of Art Enhancement Fund

Above: Joseph Stella, Self-Portrait, 1920s, metalpoint with graphite pencil on wove paper prepared with white ground on paper, 30 3/16 x 22 3/16 in. Philadelphia Museum of Art, purchased with the Alice Newton Osborn Fund, the Katharine Levin Farrell Fund, the Margaretta S. Hinchman Fund, the Joseph E. Temple Fund, and with funds contributed by Marion Boulton Stroud and Jay R. Massey, 1988, 1988-21-1

Left: Joseph Stella, Red Flower, 1929, oil on canvas, 57 1/2 x 38 1/4 in. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, 2006.102

Stella’s first silverpoint renderings of botanical form, a medium and subject that would engage him his entire career.

The exhibition continues with a focus on the work that grew out of Stella’s recurrent trips back to Italy after 1921, revealing his continued visual and metaphorical exploration of his roots. These paintings are lightfilled landscapes with fulsome, often highly stylized flora and fauna; some even feature oversized Madonna figures—a direct reference to the liturgical traditions of his youth.

Included also are studies of plants and flowers he made from frequent visits to the New York Botanical Garden and the elaborate, operatic compositions—full of drama and movement—that emerged from those visits and his travels to Italy, North Africa and Barbados. Stella’s 1937 journey to Barbados profoundly resonated with him, as evident in the lush compositions he created there. When Stella’s health began to suffer around 1940, he turned inward, returning to small and modest silverpoints of flowers in his studio. These works would remain his focus until his death in 1946.

Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue, published by the Brandywine and the High Museum of Art, featuring essays by Stephanie Heydt, the High’s Margaret and Terry Stent curator of American art and lead exhibition curator; Ara H. Merjian, professor of Italian studies at New York University; Ellen Roberts, curator of American art at the Norton Museum of Art, where the exhibition previously traveled; Karli Wurzelbacher, Heckscher Museum of Art curator; and an annotated timeline by Audrey Lewis, Associate Curator at the Brandywine Museum of Art and co-curator of the exhibition. n Lead