Joseph Stella was an Italian-born American artist best known for his representations of American modernity in the early twentieth century. Fountain (1929) is a key example of Stella’s exuberant paintings – highly stylised and festooned with birds, plants, and flowers – that reflect the abiding spiritual connection he felt with nature. If the artist’s cityscapes reflected their modern milieu, his paintings of nature were rooted in more primordial and picturesque origins, influenced in large part by the romantic views that he held of his Italian homeland. This composition places a fountain at its core, its arching streams echoed by a tree growing from – and towering above – its tranquil base of rock and water. The tree’s leafed branches cascade downward and frame the Edenic scene at hand, populated by a reclining nude figure, a swan, and a lotus flower. Stella’s recurring motifs and romantic views lend themselves to possible allegorical readings of nature as escape and oasis, especially against the suffocating conditions of modern life, and as a site of creative regeneration.
—C J Salapare
