Joseph Stella’s artistic career defies easy categorization. He was simultaneously a modernist and traditionalist, a dual citizen of the Old and New World, a bold experimenter and masterful practitioner of time-honored artistic techniques. His iconic paintings of New York City, such as the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island, celebrate modernity and the Machine Age, while his exuberant paintings of the natural world speak to the spiritual revelation that guided and grounded him throughout his life. Until recently, the divergent aspects of Stella’s career “confounded his legacy.” But in Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature, the multi-venue museum exhibition that focuses on the artist’s lifelong engagement with nature, a more complete and nuanced understanding of his career has emerged.

Amongst drawings and paintings depicting flowers, buds, birds, and other such aspects of the natural world, Joseph Stella’s signature side profile portraits stand out. As with his other works, Stella’s portraits contain elements of two distinct worlds. One on hand, the side profile perspective of his subjects recalls Renaissance tradition, while conversely, his subjects and their fixed expressions suggest something more modern. Not only does the connection to Renaissance art reflect a recurring stylistic theme in Stella’s work, but it also speaks to the fact that Stella saw Italy as a constant and everlasting source of inspiration. An effort to make his subjects feel eternal emerges within Stella’s portraits as well, demonstrated by the coming together of two eras working in harmony with one another and the monumental frozen quality of the portraits.

Additionally, Joseph Stella’s portraits were the sole outlet within which he revealed aspects of his personal life. Stella believed that an artist’s life should be kept separate from their work; he believed that the artist should “remain a mystery”. Therefore, Stella’s portraits depicting his friends provide a rare glimpse into his personal life that cannot be found elsewhere in his body of work. Stella’s portraits work also as symbols. Stella emphasizes the features of his subjects in order to create eternal portraits that act as symbolic representations of time, femininity, and humanity as a whole.