GRETEL SARMIENTO / FLORIDA WEEKLY
What do you get someone who has everything?
If you are Mother Nature and it’s up to Joseph Stella, you are getting more embellishments.
By all accounts, a modernist painter known for futuristic depictions of bridges, towers and factories is the last person we would attribute vivid pictures of lotus flowers, songbirds, and trees. The Norton Museum of Art has done just that with the show “Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature.”
Consisting of about 90 paintings and works on paper, this is the first major museum exhibition to explore the rarely seen nature-inspired body of work produced by the Italian-born artist. We can see why Stella’s renditions wouldn’t fit in a traditional landscape exhibit. The wild ecosystem he paints is anchored in energy and beauty, not realism.
Visitors are put on notice from the minute we enter the first gallery and perceive the psychedelic map emerging out of “Tree of My Life” (the largest offering in the show). It is unlike any portrait of nature we have seen before. Picture Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” but less visceral surrealism and more botanical revelation. Entangled floral motifs pulsing with bright colors cover every inch of surface and threaten to suffocate the robust olive tree at the center of the canvas. Its tallest branches improvise a pedestal that holds a delicate glass sphere of an obvious high importance. Maybe it tells the future. Maybe it contains the artist’s soul.
“Purissima” (1927), at left, and “The Virgin” (1926), at right, by Joseph Stella. GRETEL SARMIENTO
Next to it, an iPad unpacks the picture one symbol at a time. The swans — a recurrent theme in Stella’s work and this show — embody the sacred spiritual world while the red lily growing at the base of the trunk represents a “seal of generative blood,” according to the artist’s notes. He completed this painting in 1919, shortly after producing one of his most famous industrial landscapes portraying the Brooklyn Bridge. The ability to produce two equally striking and distinctive pieces almost concurrently is a testament to his artistic agility.
Detail of “Flowers, Italy” (1931), by Joseph Stella. GRETEL SARMIENTO
Born in the southern village of Muro Lucano, a 2-hour drive from Naples, Stella became infatuated with industrial America after moving to New York in 1896 at the age of 18. The crush developed into a love-hate relationship and while his modern interpretations of the buzzing metropolis brought him fame, they also made him crave greener sceneries. Throughout his life, Stella split his time between the fast-paced city and the Italian countryside, with occasional trips to Paris exposing him to Fauvism, Cubism and Futurism. His quest for a mechanism that would lighten up the weight of the city led him to design it himself. It’s his unlikely pairing of goldfish, peacocks, Italian mountains and, in some cases, religious figures such as the Madonna, that makes his natural world like no other.
To hear Norton’s Curator of American Art Ellen Roberts explain it during a gallery tour, Stella found a way to leave his mark on an exhausted topic “by combining elements of nature that wouldn’t go together in real life.”
Detail of “Lyre Bird” (circa 1925), by Joseph Stella. GRETEL SARMIENTO / FLORIDA WEEKLY
We find this unrealistic combination again in “Purissima,” a large-scale allegorical painting that underscores Virgin Mary’s holiness by dressing her in a structural cloak with floral patterns and giving her a pronounced halo. In keeping with the qualities of some 15th-century Italian painting and Catholic icons, the central figure stands flat, rigid and expressionless. By contrast, the environment around her grows and thrives, suggesting fertility more than purity. The inclusion of an erupting Mount Vesuvius in the distance grounds the otherwise otherworldly setting featuring vines, water lilies, tropical fruits and birds.
Here, as with other pieces on view, Stella goes to extreme lengths to refresh the façade of a fatigued subject. He weaves a compulsive tapestry of sharply defined organic patterns only to carve a little piece for himself, to balance out his somber city life.
The abundance of lotuses and lilies in the displayed selection suggests Asian art might have influenced him at some point. It’s possible, according to Roberts. Another question she gets asked these days is whether there’s any relation between the artist and Frank Stella, an American painter known for geometric patterns and minimalist abstractions. That’s an easy no.
Running through Jan. 15, “Visionary Nature” contends with remarkably intricate works spouting flora and fauna left and right in exquisite detail. It introduces Stella’s vision of nature as a very precise — at times overwhelming — fantasy. But it wasn’t always the case.
The reality of daily life and poor health filter through a series of loosely painted flower drawings wrapping up the show in the last gallery. They are simple, delicate, and stand as evidence of the artist’s wish to continue to create, even if that means producing a leafless gray tree devoid of ornaments, as he does in “Banyan Tree.” Instead of an embellished dense fallacy, and his usual escape toward the sunlight and the surface, Stella dives deeper seeking stillness and fortitude. He finds it here, with “Banyan Tree,” which is a humbling exercise in freedom and acceptance. ¦
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