Joseph Stella was born in Muro Lucano, a village in the province of Potenza, Italy, and came to New York in 1896, following in his older brother's footsteps, with the intention of becoming a physician. He soon abandoned his medical studies and turned instead to art, enrolling at the Art Students League and the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase. During the 1910's and 1920's, Stella became one of the foremost American modernist artists through his association with Gertrude Stein and her circle in Paris. He was friends with many of the avant-garde artists of the time, notably Marcel Duchamp and Albert Gleizes along with the Italian Futurist artists Umberto Boccioni and Gino Severini. Stella's works from the 1920's onward, however, were problematic for the cultivation of a sustained career. Once he had ceased painting in a Futurist or quasi-Cubist mode and had finished with his period of Precisionist factory images (circa 1920), he was not aligned with any particular movement. Even his retrospective at the Newark Museum, New Jersey in 1939 failed to reestablish him and his work was underappreciated at mid-century prior to being prized again in recent decades.
