John Walsh, “Lecture Series: American Views, Viewpoints, and Manipulations: Joseph Stella and the View from Brooklyn” (Yale Art Gallery)

Event time: 
Friday, December 1, 2017 - 1:30pm
Location: 
Yale Art Gallery, Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Lecture Hall See map
Event description: 

Joseph Stella’s seven-foot-high Brooklyn Bridge (1919–20) is an ecstatic vision of New York—its audacious engineering, bright lights, rumbling tunnels, and omnipresent grit—compressed and stylized on canvas. A European-trained modernist smitten by American dynamism, Stella (1877–1946) constructed a synthesis of his visual impressions and visceral reactions to his adopted city. This lecture explores Stella’s imagery, its web of associations, and the artist’s distinctive means of expression. Generously sponsored by the Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund.

About the series:

A number of paintings on view in the Yale University Art Gallery’s newly reinstalled American paintings and sculpture galleries are apt to incite curiosity about the artists’ chosen subjects. What was special about a particular view? What did the painter actually see, and from what viewpoint? While credible-looking paintings, particularly landscapes, are often assumed to be accurate, the artist has frequently manipulated observable reality for effect by exaggerating, rearranging, interpolating, or inventing. In each lecture in this series, John Walsh selects an American painting in the Gallery’s collection and examines the similarities and differences between depiction and reality, returning to the painter’s original vantage point in an attempt to work out just what happened when he returned to the studio.

How much imagery did these artists borrow from others? How often did they modify what they saw, and for what purposes? Romantic literature and art in Britain and on the Continent helped to shape the attitudes toward nature held by 19th-century American artists and their patrons, for whom national self-regard and expansionist beliefs were important factors. In the 20th century, new enthusiasms and anxieties suggested newer points of view—both literal and figurative—to artists, who found fresh ways to express their relationship to the world around them.

Generously sponsored by the Martin A. Ryerson Lectureship Fund.