New York Was His Wife

To some people, the Brooklyn Bridge is just a bad buy; to the late Joseph Stella, it was the high altar of the American dream. In its shadow, he once wrote, "I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new divinity." His paintings of the bridge made him the foremost U.S. adherent of futurism, the Italian-born industrial-minded art movement that added space to cubism in the blurring and breakup of the realistic image.

Through the years, his stark and commanding image of the bridge, its cables arranged in sparkling prisms and its diagonals portrayed as the taut rippling of dynamic muscles, became all that people wanted of him; he painted it over and over. But Stella was an energetic explorer of other styles, and current Stella exhibitions at two Manhattan galleries and the Whitney Museum of American Art show how many other bridges he might have crossed.

Cosmopolitan Clangor. Stella's first published drawings, called Americans in the Rough, appeared in 1905. They were so compelling that in 1908 a magazine sent him to Pittsburgh steel mills and West Virginia coal pits to capture the look of common laborers, immigrants like himself. He did it with the skill of Renaissance masters: character surges from every pore of sweat-stained faces, submerged in subtle eddies of pencil and charcoal. In 1909 Stella returned to Italy, where he was born, and soon met the bellicose futurists. He absorbed their lessons of the violent involvement of forms and devotion to machine-made objects. He came back to the U.S. as an acolyte of the machine esthetic.

"New York is my wife," he told a friend, and he wed her with his art. In his Battle of Lights, Coney Island, done in 1914, he depicted a warring scene of roller coasters, kaleidoscopic lights and jumbled humanity in a mosaic of maddening motion. His masterpiece, New York Interpreted, finished in 1922, is a 22-ft. pentaptych guidebook to cosmopolitan clangor. The port drags the viewer in to see a leaping skyscraper, two aspects of Broadway and a bridge--an extension of man toward a world beyond or above.

Rosy Hieroglyphs. "From 1921 on," wrote Stella in his Autobiographical Notes, "I was swinging as a pendulum from one subject to the opposite . . . I complied without any reserve with every genuine appeal to my artistic faculties, trampling those infantile barricades of the self-appointed dictators infesting the art fields." He glued together tiny collages, which he called Naturelles--accidental impastos of tissue paper, newsprint, and cardboard stamped with the tread of automobile tires or feet--in an uncanny anticipation of abstract expressionism. He took up wax crayons to create richly colored tropical scenes: surrealist flowers as big as hybrid corn, rosy hieroglyphs of animal life. These symbolic works, some plainly eruptions from his subconscious, show how, in the 1920s and 1930s, his work grew close to that of Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove in a search for a mystical reunion with natural form.

However far the pendulum of Stella's art swung, it always swung back to his romance with his beloved symbol of American technology. As late as 1939, seven years before his death, he revisited the awesome girders of the Brooklyn Bridge and once again painted its steel swoop spanning not only river but the wider barriers of sea, continent and man's soul.

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