SFMOMA, Part 24: Floor 2, section 1900 to Now.
The bridge is on fire, and it is the most beautiful thing in the room.
Not literally on fire — though Joseph Stella would probably have enjoyed the misunderstanding. Bridge (1936) is a futurist vision of the Brooklyn Bridge rendered in colors that suggest stained glass in a cathedral that worships electricity: deep blues, burning reds, black iron, gold light. The bridge's cables fan out like the ribs of a vault. The towers rise like altarpieces. At the bottom of the canvas, in a band the museum's own label compares to the predella of an altarpiece — the base panel where medieval painters put the small narrative scenes — there are circles in black, gray, electric blue, and luminous yellow. They are the subways, Stella said: the veins and arteries under the city.
Joseph Stella painted Bridge in 1936, in oil on canvas, and it measures 50 1/8 × 30 1/8 inches — 127.3 × 76.5 cm. It came to SFMOMA through the Works Progress Administration — the credit line reads "The United States General Services Administration, formerly Federal Works Agency, Works Projects Administration (WPA), allocation to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art" — which means this painting is federal property, made with New Deal money, in the middle of the Depression. It is currently on view on Floor 2 as part of 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection.
The easy reading is that this is a late futurist painting by a man whose moment had passed — Stella's great Brooklyn Bridge pictures were the 1919 versions, and by 1936 the avant-garde had moved on to other things. And it is true that Stella's career had a long, uneven middle. But the subject is sharper than that. Bridge (1936) is not a nostalgia piece. It is a WPA painting — made with government money, during the Depression, by an immigrant artist — that treats American infrastructure as sacred. The timing is the meaning. In 1936, the bridge wasn't a symbol of the past. It was a bet on the future, placed with public funds.
1877–1919: The immigrant and the bridge
Joseph Stella was born Giuseppe Michele Stella on June 13, 1877, in Muro Lucano, a village in the province of Potenza, Italy. His grandfather and father were attorneys. He came to New York in 1896 — at nineteen — to study medicine, following his older brother, who was a doctor. He quit medicine almost immediately and took up art instead, studying at the Art Students League and the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase. His first paintings were Rembrandtesque scenes of slum life: the immigrant painting the immigrant city in the style of the old world.
Then he went back to Europe — 1909 to 1912, Paris and Italy — and collided with modernism at the exact moment it was detonating. He fell in with the Italian futurists, who worshipped speed, machinery, electricity, and the violent beauty of the modern. It rewired him completely. When he came back to New York in 1912, he wrote that he had "appealed for help to the soaring verse of Walt Whitman" — Whitman, the great futurist before futurism, the poet who had already declared America a poem made of steel and steam.
The breakthrough was Battle of Lights, Coney Island (1913) — a kinetic, kaleidoscopic canvas of the amusement park at night — and then the Brooklyn Bridge pictures. The great one, Brooklyn Bridge (c. 1919, now at Yale), is a landmark of American modernism: the bridge rendered as a gothic cathedral of cables, mystical and industrial at once. Stella called New York "a monstrous steely bar erected by modern cyclops to defy the Gods with the dazzling of a thunderbolt," and he meant it as praise. For Stella and his generation, the Brooklyn Bridge — completed 1883 — was the proof that America could make sacred things out of steel.
He painted the bridge for the rest of his life. The 1939 Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme (Whitney Museum) pushes it even further into altarpiece territory — blues, reds, blacks, "the effect of light passing through stained glass." The SFMOMA Bridge (1936) is part of that long devotion: the same subject, three years earlier, slightly more earthly, with the subway circles grounding the mysticism in the city's actual circulatory system.
The Whitman problem
I want to stay on Whitman for a moment, because he is the key to Stella and nobody talks about it enough. Stella discovered Leaves of Grass as a young immigrant and treated it as an instruction manual: here is how you love a country that is not the country you were born in. Whitman's America is all appetite and electricity, a place where the body and the machine are the same poem. Stella's bridge paintings are Whitman translated into paint — the "crossing" made literal, the steel singing.
But there is a tension, and Stella lived inside it. Whitman's futurism was democratic — the open road, everybody invited. The Italian futurists' futurism was not — it was macho, violent, eventually fascist. Stella took the Italian style and filled it with Whitman's content, which is either a brilliant synthesis or a contradiction he never resolved. The bridge paintings don't resolve it either. They are too beautiful to be propaganda and too worshipful to be innocent. The cables shine like a promise. Promises are complicated.
The Pittsburgh Survey drawings are the other half of the answer. In 1908, before Europe, Stella was commissioned to illustrate industrial Pittsburgh for The Survey magazine — and what he drew was not the romance of industry but its human cost: workers dwarfed by machinery, women sewing in sweatshops, the furnaceman as a monumental, exhausted figure. He saw the machine from below before he ever painted it from above. The bridge paintings remember the view from below — that is what the subway circles are, the predella, the workers under the altarpiece. Stella never forgot who holds the bridge up.
1934–1936: The WPA years
Here is the part of the story that the futurist label obscures. By the mid-1930s, Stella's star had faded. He had returned to New York in 1934, settled in the Bronx with his wife Mary, and found himself estranged from former friends, his challenging personality having burned through the goodwill of the avant-garde. He was nearly sixty. The market for futurist odes to the machine age had collapsed along with the stock market.
So he did what thousands of American artists did: he went on the WPA. The Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project put artists on the federal payroll during the Depression — it was the largest government patronage of art in American history, and it was explicitly populist: art for the people, by the people, on the public dime. Stella, the former futurist firebrand, was not naturally sympathetic to the organization's populist ethos. But he took the work.
And the work produced this: a painting of the Brooklyn Bridge, made with New Deal money, allocated to a museum in San Francisco — a city with its own bridge obsessions. (The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937, a year after Stella painted this. The Bay Bridge opened in 1936, the same year.) There is something almost too perfect about a WPA-funded painting of an East Coast bridge hanging in a West Coast museum in the decade when California was building the two most famous bridges on earth. The federal government paid an Italian immigrant to paint a steel cathedral, and the cathedral ended up in San Francisco. The New Deal worked in mysterious ways.
The subway circles at the bottom deserve a second look. The museum's label calls them "the veins and arteries that connect the inhabitants of New York's vast landscape," and the predella comparison is doing real work. In a medieval altarpiece, the predella tells the human-scale story beneath the divine vision: the saints' lives, the miracles, the small scenes. Stella's predella tells the human-scale story beneath the bridge: the subways, the commuters, the actual bodies moving through the machine. The bridge is the heaven. The subway is the earth. The painting holds both, which is more than most altarpieces manage.
The bridge, again
Back to the canvas, because the argument is in the paint. Stella's technique here is not the fractured cubo-futurism of the 1919 pictures — it is smoother, more luminous, closer to precisionism (the American movement of Demuth and Sheeler, Stella's contemporaries in the church of the machine). The cables are drawn with a draftsman's confidence — Stella was, from his illustrator days, a remarkable draftsman — and the color does the emotional work: the blues are deep and nocturnal, the reds are ember-hot, the yellows glow like windows. It is a night painting. The bridge at night, lit from within, carrying its light across the water.
What strikes me, standing in front of it on Floor 2, is how un-ironic it is. This is 1936. Irony is available — the Dadaists had been doing it for twenty years, and the whole next half-century of American art would be built on it. Stella is not interested. He loves the bridge. He thinks it is beautiful and holy and the future. There is something almost embarrassing about the sincerity, and something magnificent. In a museum full of artists who learned to protect themselves with distance, here is a man who never learned, painting his cathedral at sixty, on the government's dime, in the middle of the Depression, meaning every brushstroke.
The futurists worshipped the machine because they thought it would destroy the old world. Stella outlived the movement and kept the worship, minus the destruction. By 1936 the machine age had produced the Depression, and Stella was painting the bridge anyway — not as a weapon against the past but as a promise to the future. The WPA paid for the promise. The museum kept it. It is still there, on Floor 2, on fire with light, waiting for you to look up. 🌁
Timeline — Joseph Stella
1877 — born Giuseppe Michele Stella, June 13, Muro Lucano, Italy
1896 — emigrates to New York at nineteen to study medicine; quits, studies art instead
1905–1909 — works as an illustrator; "prowls the streets, sketch pad and pencil in hand"
1909–1912 — returns to Europe; collides with Italian futurism in Paris and Italy
1912 — returns to New York; "appeals for help to the soaring verse of Walt Whitman"
1913 — Battle of Lights, Coney Island: the breakthrough futurist canvas
c. 1919 — Brooklyn Bridge: the landmark modernist painting (now Yale University Art Gallery)
1934 — returns to New York, settles in the Bronx; joins the WPA Federal Art Project
1936 — paints Bridge; allocated to SFMOMA through the WPA; the Bay Bridge opens the same year
1938 — travels to Barbados with his wife Mary; she dies there; his work turns tropical
1939 — Brooklyn Bridge: Variation on an Old Theme (Whitney Museum)
1946 — dies November 5, New York, of heart failure, aged sixty-nine
Today — Bridge on view, Floor 2, 1900 to Now: SFMOMA's Collection, 151 Third Street