Schoelkopf Gallery is pleased to announce the acquisition of Joseph Stella, Swans (Night), 1917 by the Vero Beach Museum in Vero Beach, Florida.
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. 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. He would never as simply and sweetly manage the synthesis as in the present pastel.
