Joseph Stella 'Still Life with Apple' c.1925 Art Exhibition Poster

A large green apple hangs on the branch - rendered in bold, saturated gouache against a sky of broken blue and white - in a composition that gives an everyday garden subject the weight and frontality of a devotional image. The work belongs to Stella's botanical still-life practice, which ran in parallel with his celebrated Futurist paintings throughout the 1920s and beyond; the Whitney Museum holds his Still Life, Fruit (c.1925), an opaque watercolour characteristic of this strand of his output.

Joseph Stella (1877–1946) was born in Muro Lucano in southern Italy and immigrated to New York in 1896. He is best known for his dynamic Futurist-inflected paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island - works that established him as one of the leading figures of the American avant-garde after the Armory Show of 1913 - but botanical subjects were a lifelong counterpart to that industrial ambition. From 1919 onwards he produced an extraordinary volume of nature-based work: silverpoint drawings of flowers and vegetables, opaque watercolours of fruit, and large-scale botanical canvases combining close observation with a near-surrealist intensity of colour. He visited the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx regularly, and once wrote that his most fervent wish was "that my every working day might begin and end, as a good omen, with the light, gay painting of a flower."

The apple compositions form a distinct thread within this broader practice. Fruit - apples, peaches, aubergine - recurs throughout his still-life work from the 1920s to the 1940s. Where his flower paintings tend toward the operatic and fantastical, the fruit studies are often more concentrated: a single subject, close up, isolating form and colour with an almost iconic simplicity. The scale at which Stella renders the apple here, filling the picture plane within its encircling branch, brings the composition closer to his monumental urban canvases than to conventional still-life convention.

Our poster imagines a memorial retrospective at the fictional Francis Penfold Gallery, 198 West 57th Street, New York, opening in April 1950 - four years after Stella's death, and at a moment when his nature-based work was only beginning to receive the sustained critical attention it deserved. The typography and layout reference the restrained institutional voice of mid-century Manhattan gallery announcements: serif-set in forest green, with the modest formality typical of West 57th Street galleries in the early postwar period.

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