While Stella achieved celebrity and acclaim for his innovative spirit, what many praised as the uniqueness and range of his vision also became Stella’s greatest obstacle to enduring success. As one observant critic, Hilton Kramer for The New

York Times, explained in a largely positive review of a Stella retrospective at the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in 1977, the artist’s “untidy” and “contradictory career” confounded his legacy. “Stella was at once a modernist and a traditionalist,” Kramer

observed, “a Futurist who still worshipped at the shrine of the old Masters, an artist with a passion for the romance of industrial America who constantly fled to . . . exotic locales . . . to renew his inspiration.”

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Making sense of Stella requires a disregard of conventional categories, as he fits into none of them neatly. Yet precisely because his art transcends categorization, it achieves something else entirely: universality. In his visionary pursuit to find something new to say about the world around him, he invites us all to see our own world anew.

— Stephanie Mayer Heydt, excerpt from "Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature"