Word: stella
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WHITNEY-22 West 54th St. The first retrospective show since Futurist Joseph Stella's death in 1946 fills two floors with his paintings, collages and drawings. Among 100 works is his most ambitious, New York Interpreted, a five-canvas panorama that glows with dark lapidary lights. Through Dec. 4. More Stella at Salpeter Gallery, 42 East 57th St. Twenty-two pastels, drawings and silverpoints. Through...
Through the years, his stark and commanding image of the bridge, its cables arranged in sparkling prisms and its diagonals portrayed as the taut rippling of dynamic muscles, became all that people wanted of him; he painted it over and over. But Stella was an energetic explorer of other styles, and current Stella exhibitions at two Manhattan galleries and the Whitney Museum of American Art show how many other bridges he might have crossed...
Cosmopolitan Clangor. Stella's first published drawings, called Americans in the Rough, appeared in 1905. They were so compelling that in 1908 a magazine sent him to Pittsburgh steel mills and West Virginia coal pits to capture the look of common laborers, immigrants like himself. He did it with the skill of Renaissance masters: character surges from every pore of sweat-stained faces, submerged in subtle eddies of pencil and charcoal. In 1909 Stella returned to Italy, where he was born, and soon met the bellicose futurists. He absorbed their lessons of the violent involvement of forms and devotion...
Rosy Hieroglyphs. "From 1921 on," wrote Stella in his Autobiographical Notes, "I was swinging as a pendulum from one subject to the opposite . . . I complied without any reserve with every genuine appeal to my artistic faculties, trampling those infantile barricades of the self-appointed dictators infesting the art fields." He glued together tiny collages, which he called Naturelles-accidental impastos of tissue paper, newsprint, and cardboard stamped with the tread of automobile tires or feet-in an uncanny anticipation of abstract expressionism. He took up wax crayons to create richly colored tropical scenes: surrealist flowers as big as hybrid corn...
However far the pendulum of Stella's art swung, it always swung back to his romance with his beloved symbol of American technology. As late as 1939, seven years before his death, he revisited the awesome girders of the Brooklyn Bridge and once again painted its steel swoop spanning not only river but the wider barriers of sea, continent and man's soul...