Photo By Gail

For Joseph Stella (1877 – 1946) and many of his contemporaries, the central icon of American cultural achievement was the Brooklyn Bridge, which had been completed in 1883. He first depicted the bridge in 1918 and returned to it throughout his career.

The artist saw it in religious terms, as a “shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America – the eloquent meeting point of all forces arising in a superb assertion of their powers, in apotheosis.”

Fittingly, in Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme (1939) he depicted the bridge as a modern day altar, its soaring cables and pointed Gothic arches emphasized by his pallet of blues, reds, and blacks that alludes to light filtering through a stained-glass window.

Photographed in the Whitney Museum in New York City.