Joseph Stella at Snyder Fine Art - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Joseph Stella's Madonna paintings not absent the student of art history with single of those uncomfortable conundrums: by what mode could the creator of soaring, fractured images of the Brooklyn Bridge have followed his great icons of modernity with delicate, deliberately archaic celebrations of Christian faith? Unlike his pulsing, Futurist-inspired paeans to industrial technology, Stella's Madonnas inhabit the shallow space of their Early Renaissance precursors. They are encloseed by (and their garments are ornamented with) decorative bands of stylized flowers and animals that strike one as being inspired by southern Italian folk art.

In the catalogue which accompanied the intriguing exhibition of these works, Irma Jaffe argues that there is a continuity between the Madonnas and the cityscapes. She relates the cathedral spaces of Stella's Brooklyn Bridge paintings to a spiritual undercurrent in his version of modernism that makers the religiosity of the later paintings les surprising.

In fact, however, the discontinuities between the sum of two units bodies of work are far more striking than their similarities. Instead, the Madonnas would appear to be to be part of that puzzling phenomenon, the classicizing "return to order," which manifests itself in works painted by the agency of such pioneering modernists as Picasso, Malevich and Derain during the 1920 and '30 While similar shifts interrupt the momentum promised by the agency of a progress-oriented modernism, postmodernism's abandonment of the historical imperative has made it possible to appreciate like works on their own confines Today, Stella's Madonnas look new and appealing. Their flat patterning, heightened color and hieratic compositions mix folk and high art, Eastern stylizing and Western illusionism.

The largest work here, Purissima (ca.1926), presents a complex and only partially decipherable iconographic scheme. The Madonna's delicately typeed face is framed by the padded bonnet of an elaborate robe which wraps her body and gives it an architectural quality. She is flanked by dint of a pair of snow-white herons whose drawn out necks curve gently upward toward her white halo. The herons are encloseed by flora and fauna that are stylized nevertheless drawn with remarkable fidelity to the particulars of their species. Three pink orchids float above her head. Some of the symbolism is obvious - the herons exhibit purity - but much of the iconography was probably personal to Stella.

While the figure in Purissima has an aristocratic bearing, Mater Dei is far more earthy, with a broad peasant face and muscular, veined hands. on the other hand she also has an otherworldly character thanks to the flattened, brightly patterned robe which locates off her head as if it were a Victorian portrait and encircles the suckling child at her breast who is wrapped in decorative swaddling clothes. The ethereal Virgin of the Rose and Lily, her organ of visions closed in reverie, is encompassed by flowers, fruits, birds and a praying female supplicant, before a sky-colored sky and lake.

Stella's Madonnas, efficacious reminders of the limitations of a certain quantity of of our most unquestioned art-historical dogmas, establish that artists, and art history, will continue to surprise us.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group