From Stella to Stella

Immigrant art, the art of the exile, of the artist caught between traditional and new iconographies, between the old landscape and the new urban environment is a conflictual expression of deterritorialization and territorialization, most fully demonstrated by Joseph Stella’s double identity as the first American Italian and the first Italian American painter. Stella’s position, in some respects unique to him, involves a constant migration between the two visual cultures. The question of locating Italian American visual culture crops up from the very start, with the Italian-born Joseph Stella, the first painter of the Italian American experience. Lebrun’s Italianness was translated by American critics into two of the aesthetic categories—the baroque and humanism, specifically the residual humanism fixated on the human figure—that are internal to Italian culture. The untutored Rodia is the embodiment of the Italian American naif, a blue-collar, ghetto version of the great Spanish architect Gaudi, who attempted to build a cathedral in Barcelona single-handedly.