Joseph Stella 1880 - 1946

By descent in the family of the artist to the present owners

Paris, France, Douane Centrale Exposition
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Joseph Stella, April-October 1994, p. 269 (as Sirens)

This work is in good condition. The canvas is unlined. There is a small area of paint separation in the red flower at lower left and a few horizontal lines of cracking in the blue figure at the upper center. There is an original tack visible in the brown plant at the upper center. Under UV: There are strokes of inpainting along the right and left side of the central figure to address paint separation. There is one area of inpainting in the upper arm of the figure at left and minor dots of inpainting scattered throughout.
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Joseph Stella—an American artist of Italian birth—produced an extraordinarily diverse range of works throughout his career. His compositions varied in subject matter, media, style, and format and his unwaveringly vigorous creativity was influenced by a variety of factors. In Sirens, Stella presents his unique interpretation of the seductive women from classical Greek mythology who lured sailors to their deaths with their enchanting voices. The painting’s two figures appear in profile with arms lifted, eyes closed, heads raised upward, and lips slightly parted. Fantastical and decorative embellishments are lyrically woven around their bodies and throughout the canvas. With its highly saturated color palette and stylized decoration, the present work exemplifies the imaginative and dreamlike imagery that appeared in Stella’s works of the 1920s.

In 1922 Stella returned home to southern Italy where he found himself in “a state of grace, painting from morning to night, living a life of complete bliss” (John I.H. Baur, Joseph Stella, New York, 1971, p. 47). It was during this period that he first became interested in the transcendent quality of the art of antiquity and the Renaissance. The devastation of the First World War was still fresh in the minds of Americans, and “the classical tradition seemed to offer a haven of tranquility and order—a means by which to escape the uncertainty and equivocation of the age” (Barbara Haskell, Joseph Stella, New York, 1994, p. 135). Stella did not seek to copy directly from earlier periods. Rather, believing that art should be free from both time and place, he sought to connect the art of the classical past with that of the present.

In attempting to reconcile Renaissance themes with a modern aesthetic in this period, Stella created some of the most eclectic and successful works of his career. In 1928, a selection of Stella’s paintings exhibited at the Valentine Gallery in New York were met with high acclaim. Barbara Haskell writes, “their archaic classicism, inventive color, and decorative brilliance appealed to a community that yearned for reassurance that originality and tradition were not contradictory, and that the past could be successfully assimilated into the present” (Haskell, p. 162).