Stephanie Mayer Heydt – författare

Still life celebrates the commonplace. But in these simple objects we invest meaning—meaning that can be culturally specific but also universal. From the seventeenth century onward in Europe, a shared visual language developed around the practice of still life painting. In early nineteenth century America, artists adapted established formats to suit new circumstances. Drawing examples from three American and one French museum, this catalogue traces the development of American still life painting and its European precedents. American Enounters: The Simple Pleasures of Still Life is the final installment of the series, a collaborative project between Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Musée du Louvre, the High Museum of Art, and the Terra Foundation for American Art investigating four key genres in nineteenth century American art: landscape, genre, portraiture, and still life.

The first major monograph on the visionary nature paintings of the pioneering American modernistPublished with Brandywine River Museum of Art and High Museum of Art.Though Joseph Stella is primarily recognized for his dynamic Futurist-inspired paintings of New York, particularly of the Brooklyn Bridge, he was also compelled to express the powerful connection he felt to the natural world, a subject he pursued persistently throughout his career. Visionary Nature presents an overdue examination of this prolific and wide-ranging body of nature-based work.If Stella’s cityscapes became symbols of a modern era, his pictures of flowers, plants, birds and trees were rooted in another, more ancient, primal and paradisaical world. Inspired by archaic and classical precedents as well as his own brand of spirituality, these lyrical and exuberant works are also his least understood. By focusing on his unique visual vocabulary and the context in which it developed, Visionary Nature reconsiders how his nature paintings relate to his career, revealing a surprising continuity between seemingly disparate subjects and exploring how these works are reflective of Stella’s passionate spirituality. His close affiliation with the natural world shaped a body of work that ranged from vividly realistic to poetically transcendent and visionary in its unique expression.Joseph Stella (1877–1946) was born in Italy and moved to New York City in 1896. He belonged to avant-garde circles on both sides of the Atlantic and achieved international notoriety in the 1910s for his large-scale paintings of modern America. For the remainder of his career, he traveled widely and produced a large body of nature-themed work. He died in 1946 from heart failure.