Joseph Stella was fascinated with swans throughout his career, but the present work is among his earliest depictions of the majestic waterfowl. At this early stage in Stella’s artistic career, he was still wrestling mightily with the subject matter in his work. Having begun as an illustrator, he spent the heart of the 1910s pouring himself into abstraction, channeling Cubism and Futurism into his electric views of Coney Island, and soon, the Brooklyn Bridge. But in 1917, he was just beginning to embrace the symbolist mode that would characterize his mature style.

The present work, an early exploration of the symbolic power of fauna, is a complex and beautiful hybrid of two strands of thinking that would dominate Stella’s career. Irma Jaffee describes this moment:

During the very years when his attention was gripped by the industrial scene and while still composing such near-abstract paintings as Spring, Stella was working simultaneously with a subject matter and style as far removed from the steel and concrete forms and dramatic lighting of the modern world as from the faceted surfaces of Cubism. Around 1916 he started to produce . . . nature lyrics in pastel that fall into two general groups – Nocturnes, characteristically dark and silvery in tonality; and Serenades, Prayers, and related subjects, usually pale, sometimes pervaded by a golden light [Irma Jaffee, Joseph Stella (1970), p. 81].

A cardinal example of these “Golden Light” pictures would be 1920’s Tree of My Life, perhaps his most encyclopedic symbolist picture, a vast compendium of flowers, birds, and biomorphic architecture under a bright Flemish blue sky. The prime example of the other strand that Jaffee identifies, “Nocturnes,” is Stella’s urban masterpiece, New York Interpreted (Newark Museum). The five-panel elegy to the Brooklyn Bridge defines the “Nocturne,” employing sharp-edges, a cool, silvery palette, and nearly-abstract forms to evoke the gothic elements of the vertically-springing city at night. Stella’s feelings about the city were ambivalent – he described the city alternately as divine and as a “Dantesque inferno” – but the underlying timbre of his nocturnes is all cool romance. That great work was, in 1917, still a few years off, and indeed it can be considered an articulation of the theme rather than its archetype.

Jaffee identifies the present work as the model of Stella’s Nocturnes, “A typical example of a nocturne is Night, with its sharply silhouetted forms and slow cadenced, long curvilinear rhythms” [Ibid.]. Indeed, echoes of the two swan necks can be easily identified in panel II of New York Interpreted, rendering their curvilinear rhythms in an explicitly mechanical, steel setting, a formal counterpoint to the work’s rigid verticality.

The mood of the present work, however, has none of the ambivalence of the city, none of the mechanical menace. The two swans glide out of a rounded arch, a silvery rainbow that suggests the moon – its roundness a formal resistance to the sinister linearity of the The City Interpreted. The only vertical linear element in the picture suggests a tree, rather than a skyscraper. In this manner, Stella fuses his two fixations – Edenic nature, and nightmarish city – into a single work.

This fusion represented a success he would not soon repeat. In the ensuing years, he would explore great birds, including swans and herons, but increasingly only in the bright light of day. The work was originally exhibited, in 1918 at the Bourgeois Galleries, New York, as simply Night. Given the many other works that interrogate the nocturnal, it is not surprising that it was was also exhibited simply as Swans.

The present work marks the beginning of a long-time fascination with the picture’s majestic creatures. By the mid-1920s, Stella had executed a number of canvases centered around great birds; herons played central roles, but Stella reserved pride of place for the swan. Jaffe notes that Stella’s symbolism is individualist, building upon but not necessarily replicating interpretations of classical iconography. His use of the swan is a case in point. His reference point was the Greek myth of Leda and the Swan, in which Zeus takes the form of a swan to seduce the married Leda, a union producing Helen of Troy. In 1924-25, Stella painted Leda and the Swan among several other interpretations of mythological genesis. Stella wrote of his Leda:

The Myth of Leda is the myth of creation, of joyous, ardent creation, blowing its divine breath into the wind and sun. The act is pure and simple, without pretext or pretense…and it is sanctified, raised high, as a spur and example to human beings. The urgent need of fecundation, a kind of christening from which we are born in splendor, arises, ascends and is framed, set in the purest realms of the clearest blue heaven. Creative energy is clean and chaste, symbolized by the shimmering white of the swan which flings itself upon her as if upon an altar, to perform its rite upon the full golden, incorruptible body of the goddess of fertility [translated and quoted by Irma Jaffe, Joseph Stella’s Symbolism (1994), pl. 22].

Though the myth has erotic and violent elements, Stella retained only the innocent aspects. This chaste creation theme appeared in his work in a variety of forms, from depictions of the Virgin Mary to the birth of Venus, and in a variety of allegorical motifs. The swan, removed from its mythical setting, as in the present work, represented to Stella the creative impulse.

By fusing this classical message to modernist formal elements, Stella created a picture strangely and beautifully out of time. The greater fusion of nocturne and celebration of life is even more special in Stella’s oeuvre. Though he struggled with the two for the rest of his career, he would never as simply and sweetly manage the synthesis as in the present pastel.