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THE ONE outstanding futurist in America was Joseph Stella, although a number of other artists were influenced by this Italian-born movement which attempted to infuse dynamic motion into the static patterns of cubism in order to express the speed of contemporary life. Perhaps Stella's fascination with futurism was due in part to his Italian birth (at Muro Lucano in 1879 or '80--the date is still unsettled). Or it may be that his always romantic temperament found in the futurist style a perfect means to express his highly emotional response to New York.
He had come here in 1896, had studied medicine for two years, then painting at the New York School of Art and Art Students League. For a time he was an illustrator and was sent by The Survey to draw Pittsburgh's steel mills. But Stella's mature career began when he met the Italian futurists on a trip to France and Italy in 190912, the years of the movement's birth. On his return he saw America with a new and typically futurist eye--a land of skyscrapers, clangor and rushing modernity. With furious intensity he set out to capture it on canvas.
First came his Battle of Lights, Coney Island, a painting full of the glitter and noise of its subject. Taking elements from all parts of the amusement park, breaking them into fragments, reassembling them in a wildly gyrating pattern of futurist V-lines and curving force lines, Stella showed a natural mastery of the futurist method. All of this skill and even more feeling went into his painting of Brooklyn Bridge, a subject that obsessed him as "the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America," and which moved him as if "in the presence of a new DIVINITY."
Seldom has a feat of engineering been more romantically celebrated than in the night vision of the bridge which he painted, according to his notes, "rapid and intense with no effort." Stella's final apotheosis of the metropolis was the set of five immense panels called New York Interpreted, done in 1920-22. A little drier and more labored than his earlier work, they are nevertheless a vivid synthesis of the city's soaring aspects, its total impact on the senses.
Stella lived until 1946 but the last twenty-five years of his life produced little of consequence. From the beginning he had been drawn to nature as well as to the machine age, and occasionally he had used his futurist method, as in the picture Spring, to weave a poetic pattern of growth. More often, however, his nature subjects were done in a decorative style of over-bright colors that has not worn well. It is for his ardent response to New York that Stella will be best remembered.
Stella: And when in 1912 I came back to New York I was thrilled to find America so rich with so many new motives to be translated into a new art.
Steel and electricity had created a new world. A new drama had surged . . . a new poliphony was ringing all around with the scintillating, highly-colored lights. The steel had leaped to hyperbolic altitudes and expanded to vast latitudes with the skyscrapers and with bridges made for the conjunction of worlds. A new architecture was created, a new perspective.
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