Joseph Stella Italian, American, 1877-1946

Reverse painting on glass was practiced in America as early as the eighteenth century. A folk art traditionally associated with craft practiced by women, reverse painting on glass captured the attention of modernists in the twentieth century, including Americans Marsden Hartley and Joseph Stella, who described glass as “a utopian substance that would make up the technological world of the future.” European modernists also experimented with the medium of glass using a variety of methods. Wassily Kandinsky was one of the early adopters of the medium. Marc Chagall painted 86 stained glass windows across Europe, Israel, and the United States, including Reims Cathedral. Surrealist artists developed the technique decalcomania, in which wet paint is transferred to a glass support through a blotting process, creating a pattern produced by chance without conscious thought. Dada leader Marcel Duchamp famously used glass as a support to create his ambitious The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915–23), in which he investigated mechanical process, pictorial illusion, and chance. Duchamp was Stella's good friend and may have encouraged him to experiment with the medium.

This episode is rare in Stella's body of work as he only produced twelve examples of reverse paintings on glass. Stella produced a related pastel Red and Orange Flower