Brooklyn and Basilicata: Locating Modernity in Joseph Stella’s "Tree of My Life"

Virtual on Zoom | Register to be emailed the Zoom link information. 

with Kyle Mancuso, Curatorial Research Associate, High Museum of Art

Best remembered for his large-scale, Futurist-inspired paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge, Italian-born American modernist Joseph Stella produced an equally substantial body of work on the natural world. The most ambitious expression of this part of his career is Tree of My Life (1919), a painting brimming with organic forms and chock-full of personal references that reveal an artist mediating between a busy New York City life and the Italian countryside to which he frequently escaped. This talk will explore how Stella's paintings and personality are deeply linked and how the changing Italian landscape of the 1910s and 20s complicates our understanding of the artist's experience in the country of his birth.