Human Flower Project
Joseph Stellas Resolution
By on February 28th, 2022 in
Joseph Stella’s Resolution
Restart—whether with flowers or dumb bells. It’s the season of discipline.
Abstraction
by Joseph Stella
Image: via Pomegranate
“…that my every working day might begin and end, as a good omen, with the light, gay painting of a flower.”
Joseph Stella called this his “devout wish” (My Painting, 1946)—synonymous, we’d say, with a resolution.
Have you made one? It’s already January 3rd and we’re still vacillating between grandiosity (to join a gospel choir, learn Japanese) and timidity (keep on flossing).
We came upon Joseph Stella’s resolution this fall, visiting the Smithsonian American Art Museum. His articulation of a human flower project was printed on the wall label below Neapolitan Song, painted in 1926 – four years after Stella had revisited his beloved Italian homeland.
Neapolitan Song (1926), by Joseph Stella
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.
Photo: Human Flower Project
From the little we know of him, he seems to have mustered this resolution and followed through early in his career, bucking considerable peer pressure to do so. Studying at the Art Students League in 1896 (hotbed of early Modernists) he bridled at the academy’s “rule forbidding the painting of flowers.” Low-life in the city and steel girders were the order of the day (actually Stella was quite good with girders, too). By 1897 he had moved to the New York School of Art to work with William Merritt Chase, a pro-flora painter to be sure.
(For much more about the artist and his floral works, see Joseph Stella: Flora, the text available online. It catalogues an exhibition held January 8 – March 6, 1998 at Eaton Fine Art, West Palm Beach, Florida, and includes a long essay by Barbara Rose.)
Catalogue of Joseph Stella, Flora
Eaton Fine Art, Palm Beach, Florida
Reading about Stella’s life, we wonder if he didn’t suffer from Seasonal Affective Disorder, as the gray winters of New York and, later, Paris, really got him down. He seems to have required periodic infusions of sun and green to keep on working: a long visit in Venice, the Naples trip, and late in life, a journey to Barbados. We think it also probable that each of us carries a special affinity for the climate, the colors, and plants of our childhoods. For a painter, this affinity would reasonably be intensified, in some cases amounting to a kind of craving – Van Gogh for his irises, water lilies and palms for Joseph Stella.
As for his devout wish – to paint a flower every day – what a sign of health, to turn personal necessity, no matter how quirky or against the grain, into an explicit plan. May all our resolutions be as honest and as clearly consummated.
Comments
Nicole,
Interesting inquiry. The Smithsonian’s American Art Museum lists this work as “Gift of Françoise and Harvey Rambach”
http://www.americanart.si.edu/treasures/1ma/index-noframe.html?/treasures/1ma/2000.11.html
so you could say it was free! I know that museums are reluctant to divulge the appraised values or sale prices of their holdings, but you could always contact a curator there and see what you can learn. Also, if the work at any time sold through one of the big auction houses—Sotheby’s or Christie’s, for example—there’s an auction record somewhere. Typically one has to be a paid subscriber to gain such information, though.
If I learn more, I’ll pass it on.
How much do you think it’s worth?
Hello,
I am a student from Branford High School. In one of my classes we are doing a project that is on podern art. The painting that i am trying to find out information on is Neapolitan Song by Jospeh Stella. I was wondering if you can tell me the price that it was sold for.
Thankyou,
Nicole Proto