In 1913, Joseph Stella returned to New York, his world view changed.
Stella had spent part of the previous four years travelling around his native Italy unable to find the stimulation he needed to progress as an artist. Feeling weighed down by the omnipresent legacy of the Renaissance, he relocated to Paris where Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism were in ‘full swing,’ he later recalled. ‘There was in the air the glamour of a battle, the holy battle raging for the assertion of a new truth. My youth plunged full into it.’
But Stella came to realise that to become the artist he envisioned himself as, New York was where he neededto be. ‘I had witnessed the growth and expansion of New York proceeding parallel to the development of my own life . . . and therefore I was feeling entitled to interpret the titanic efforts, the conquests already obtained by the imperial city in order to become what now She is, the centre of the world.’
Soon after, another momentous event happened to Stella.
He was still ‘struggling’ artistically, ‘working along the lines of the Old Masters, seeking to portray a civilisation long since dead.’
But one day, as he arrived at Coney Island by bus, he was ‘struck by the dazzling array of lights. It seemed as if they were in conflict. I was struck with the thought that here was what I had been unconsciously seeking for so many years . . . On the spot was born the idea for my first truly great picture.’
The resulting large-scale masterpiece, ‘Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras’ (1913-14), employs the pictorial strategies gleaned from his time in Paris, with the American twist he was seeking to define himself as an original artistic voice. His treatment of the lights and façade of Luna Park, an amusement park, stylised into hundreds of thrusting and interlocking geometric splinters across the entire picture plane, takes the image to the brink of abstraction. As a result, this activation of the entirety of the composition gleefully anticipates Helen Frankenthaler’s shift towards a ‘total colour image’ in the early 1960s, as critic B. H. Friedman has described this sea change in her painterly evolution.
Stella’s desire for Europe and ultimately his need to return to America and success thereafter, illustrates the fertile ground and blank canvas the country’s industrious rise offered artists as the 20th century came into being. It would be only a matter of time before a school of American modernism came to the forefront of the greater public consciousness both nationally and internationally. An event that began in the mid-1940s with the emergence of Abstract Expressionism, a term coined by the art critic Robert Coates in a 1946 review of work by Arshile Gorky, Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning for The New Yorker.
But in delving deeply into the often-overlooked shoulders that the giants of Abstract Expressionism stand on, such as Stella and other early American modernists, we see how beautifully and stubbornly intertwined the influence of European artistic traditions past and present are. And we see just how vital their innovation in modifying, altering and welding ideas together was in preparing the foundations for what came next.
Thomas Hart Benton offers another fascinating conduit between Europe’s artistic past and present, and America’s future.
Benton, a leading proponent of what came to be known as Regionalism, was widely known for his vividly animated paintings, murals and prints depicting rural workers in their bucolic mid-western surroundings.
In 1909, while continuing his studies at the Académie Julian in Paris, Benton became infatuated by the paintings of El Greco, a relationship richly explored by noted art historian Henry Adams.
During the last decades of the 16th century, Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco, finally found renown in Toledo, Spain, for his highly original take on mannerism, having first immersed himself and become literate in the prevailing artistic schools of Venice and Rome. His paintings, which deeply influenced Picasso and the development of Cubism, are characterised by expressionistic brushwork, a lurid colour palette, use of heightened contrast, and elongated forms which are further distorted by a subtle curvilinear perspective that awards his paintings the appearance of a vision.
Returning to America, Benton began teaching while forging his artistic voice. As his compositions grew more ambitious in pictorial arrangement, El Greco served as an increasingly important and visible foundation.
To better understand El Greco’s and other Old Master’s figural arrangements, Benton devised an exercise to deconstruct their paintings which he also taught his students. The first, to study their surface arrangement, was to reduce them to line drawings showing their movement in and occupation of space. The second, to study their volumetric form, was to render them as three-dimensional shapes that showed their depth in relation to one another. Benton outlined this exercise in ‘The Mechanics of Form Organisation in Painting’, a series of five articles that appeared in The Arts Magazine between 1926 and 1927, choosing El Greco’s late-career paragon ‘The Adoration of the Shepherds’ (c. 1605-10) as his case study to illustrate it.
One student, a young Jackson Pollock, made no fewer than 28 sketches after El Greco’s paintings in the same manner; significantly more than any other Old Master painter that appears in his sketchbooks. Examining these, we see Pollock experimenting, modelling the exercises with streaks of colour, or exaggerating the weight of the lines and extending them so that they join in a dark web. Each intervention further removing the image from its figural roots and edging it ever closer towards abstraction.
When seen in concert, works like Pollock’s ‘Mural’ (1943) and those from his ‘Black Pourings’ series, share a considerable visual and structural overlap with both El Greco’s and Benton’s paintings. It can be persuasively argued that Benton’s efforts to expand on El Greco’s painterly preoccupations greatly afforded Pollock the ability to both quickly master the essence of El Greco’s compositional dynamism and provide the confidence to then abstract the figural elements completely. In this light, as Adams argues, Pollock can be seen ‘not so much an avatar of modern art as an artist who represents the end of a great tradition: the last, truly inventive master of the figurative, rhythmic design principles of the Old Masters; El Greco above all.’
Five years after achieving success with ‘Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras’, Stella painted ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ (1919-20), the work he is most well known for. Similarly oscillating on the cusp of abstraction, Stella renders the recently opened bridge in a Cubist and Futurist inspired symphony of sweeping, angular forms made even more imposing by a distorted perspective reminiscent of the kind used by El Greco. ‘I was thrilled to find America so rich with so many new motives to be translated into a new art,’ Stella reminisced. ‘Steel and electricity had created a new world. A new drama had surged from the unmerciful violation of darkness at night, by the violent blaze of electricity and a new polyphony was ringing all around with the scintillating, highly coloured lights. The steel had leaped to hyperbolic altitudes and expanded to vast latitudes with the skyscrapers and with bridges made for the conjunction of worlds. A new architecture was created, a new perspective.’
The ripples of influence that these works cast onto the wider American artistic imagination, as well as the ‘new art’ that Stella helped construct the visual language for, was quietly enormous. During another evocative explanation of what the Brooklyn Bridge symbolised to him, we sense the magnitude of what Stella and other early American modernists were doing signified to the artists who reshaped history in their footsteps: ‘I felt deeply moved, as if on the threshold of a new religion or in the presence of a new divinity.’
