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Joseph Stella Italian, American, 1877-1946
Untitled (Still Life with Peaches), undatedPastel on paper11½ x 14½ inches
29.2 x 36.8 cmSigned at lower left: Jos StellaJoseph Stella often painted traditional tabletop still lifes of flowers or fruit set in his studio. Regardless of how conventional the format, he approached even the most quotidian subject with...Joseph Stella often painted traditional tabletop still lifes of flowers or fruit set in his studio. Regardless of how conventional the format, he approached even the most quotidian subject with personal flair, adding a dimension of emotion to a composition through his unexpected use of color, setting, or scale.
...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"
Provenance
The artist; to
Estate of the artist, 1946; toPrivate collection, 1946 to 1990; by descent to
Private collection, circa 1990 until the present
Exhibitions
Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Florida; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia; Brandywine Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature, October 15, 2022–September 24, 2023Literature
Stephanie Mayer Heydt, Ellen E. Roberts, Karli Wurzelbacher, Ara H. Merjian, and Audrey Lewis, Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature, Atlanta: High Museum of Art, 2022, p. 207, pl. 108, illus. in color p. 166
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