Visions of American Modernity in Joseph Stella’s The Voice of the City of New York

Interpreted

In this paper, I’ll be talking about the visions of American modernity presented in a polyptych

painted by the Italian-American artist, Joseph Stella, between 1920 and 1922, called The Voice

of the City of New York Interpreted. It’s hard to get a sense of the scale here, but the overall

image eight feet tall and twenty-two and a half feet long – or two and half metres by 6.8 metres.

Stella’s painting is often interpreted as a celebration of New York’s electric modernity at the

height of the roaring twenties. These interpretations stem from the fame of the sites that Stella

depicts – you’ve got icons like Brooklyn Bridge, the Flatiron building, and Broadway – and

Stella’s own association with the Futurist movement. In this paper, however, I want to

scrutinise this seeming celebration of American modernity and explore how Stella’s vision of

the modern American metropolis is split in two distinct halves: the built environment and the

lived experience of the modern metropolis. In doing so, I argue, Stella confronts us with the

gulf between the imagined experience of the modern city and its lived reality.

In The Voice of New York, Stella revives a traditional format of painting presentation from the

Italian Renaissance, known as the polyptych. While traditional polyptychs represent religious

icons – for example, this polyptych by the Italian painter Giotto from the fourteenth century

presents the Virgin Mary surrounded by saints – Stella revises the form to incarnate the city of

New York as a secular icon of American modernity. In the space reserved in altarpieces for a

Madonna and Child or a Crucifixion, Stella gives us the skyscrapers of New York, looming

towards us, led by the iconic Flatiron building, which, for contemporary commentators

resembled the prow of a ship. The Voice of the City, then, is surely a devoted celebration of

New York city?

impressive in its scale than in its execution. For Irma B. Jaffe, for example, the separation of

the city across five “individually powerful” canvases instils “pictorial incoherence” within

Stella’s city. And there is something fundamentally overwhelming about Stella’s work – it is

both physically and visually demanding, towering over the viewer and pulling our attention in

multiple different directions.

There is, however, method behind Stella’s seeming visual madness. Stella’s clear distinction

between the bright “White Way” panels – Leaving the Subway and Broadway – and the far

more muted outer and central panels splits The Voice of the City into two discreet parts. These

sections fracture New York into structural elements and sensory elements. Where the physical

structures of The Battery, The Prow and Brooklyn Bridge anchor the image, the visual dazzle

of Leaving the Subway and Broadway punctuate the gloom with their bursts of colour.

I want to start my navigation of The Voice of the City by focusing on the three structural panels

– The Prow, or Skyscrapers, Brooklyn Bridge, or, The Bridge, and The Battery, or, The Port.

Stella’s depiction of these structural icons of New York is slightly curious. If we look at the

contemporary context of Stella’s work, we can trace a line of painterly progression from Childe

Hassam’s impressionist portrayals of the growing city in the closing decade of the nineteenth

century to, for example, George Bellows’s street-level vision of New York fifteen years later,

in 1911. There are recognisable stylistic parallels between the two – the looseness of the

brushstrokes, for example – but what really connects these two images is their presentation of

what sociologist Georg Simmel describes as the conglomerate experience of city life. The

figures captured mid-motion present the city as a backdrop to numerous ongoing life narratives,
creating a “rapid crowding of changing images”. In contrast, the built environment of New

York serves as the backdrop, providing “impressions which take a regular and habitual course”.

By the mid-1910s, however, this gulf between the lived experience of the city and the physical

structures of the city itself was beginning to collapse. In the work of Max Weber and John

Marin, for example, the human figure is removed from the metropolis entirely: the energy of

modern life suggested by the bustling crowds of Bellows is instead transferred to the built

environment. The buildings are active, almost animate, and expressive: in the truly modern

metropolis, then, the built environment is the lived environment. The city is vibrant, pulsing

with life.

We might expect Stella’s work to continue this tradition – there’s certainly enough going on in

The Voice of the City to give the impression that New York is almost overwhelmingly alive.

Yet, Stella presents the structural elements of New York as fiercely static. The skyscrapers in

skyscrapers in The Prow and Brooklyn Bridge, for example, are simplified to the point of

blockishness and are rigidly rectilinear. The expression of distance Stella derives from

nineteenth century Japanese landscapes, where near and far are compressed and objects are

stacked vertically, rather than through the Western tradition where lines of perspective

converge in a single vanishing point, confines the skyscrapers in The Prow. As each building

stacks into the next abstraction, it is effectively contained by its surroundings – held in place,

totally devoid of the immersive dynamism of Marin and Weber.

As viewers, we, too, are held in stasis by these panels, perpetually distanced from the

metropolis by Stella’s external perspectives. In Brooklyn Bridge, the city’s presence is

overshadowed by the black framing of the bridge’s Gothic arches and viscerally dark central
mullion. In The Prow, the matching perspectives of the subway in Stella’s predella and the

metallic blue streak at the skyscrapers’ base make the city recede from its audience, rendering

the metropolis physically unattainable. Stella’s dislocation of the viewer breaks with the

situated approach often constructed within American art from Impressionism onwards. In

contrast, Stella’s image of the city functions as a mask: the viewer is confronted by it,

particularly in the massive central canvas, but not permitted access beyond the façade. In

Stella’s own words, his New York is a “chimeric reality”.

This sense of distance within Stella’s structural panels is rooted in the lived experience of New

York. For those who lived in this American metropolis, visually apprehending their built

environment from inside the city itself was virtually impossible. There were simply too many

big buildings, too close together. As Stella’s painting advertises through the repeated vertical

bars of colour which punctuate each canvas from to top, the twentieth-century city’s defining

feature was its insistent verticality. By reading Stella’s five-and-a half-feet tall linear

abstractions from bottom to top, the viewer mimics the limited visual access city dwellers had

to their own environment. As Meir Wigoder explains, a New Yorker had two “extreme

possibilities […] of seeing his city: either to throw his head back and look up at it or to go up

and look down at it”.

Beyond the challenges of visual apprehension, the modern metropolis was also difficult for its

inhabitants to access imaginatively. To many city-dwellers, the newfound height of such

skyscrapers remained a concept too difficult to gauge: as Wigoder explains, journalistic

descriptions of a building’s height often relied on “horizontal spatial terms”. For example, a

1909 cover of Scientific American illustrates the height of the Metropolitan Life Tower by

laying it sideways through the city. As the city’s built environment towers over the viewer in
Stella’s painting, the vertical abstractions reinforce the idea that metropolis’s predominant

verticality is a fundamentally inhuman environment that is physically, visually and

imaginatively inapprehensible.

With city-dwellers unable to apprehend the built environment that surrounded them, an

emphasis on “the skyline” began to emerge. Guidebooks produced for the growing tourist

industry, Wigoder writes, “started their introduction with a description of the city panorama

from the water […] The introductions were titled “The Picture,” implying that in order to see

the city as an aesthetic coherent unit one must always stand outside it and be detached.” In The

Prow and Brooklyn Bridge, Stella creates this detachment, positioning us as outside the city,

looking in.

However, as early as 1900, this need to be detached from the urban environment in order to

comprehend it began to be identified as a form of false escapism. An article in Harper’s

magazine describing New York from a ferry, for example, celebrates “the dignity of the civic

life”, but also concedes that “a closer inspection [of the city] reveals much that is brutal,

amorphous, incoherent.”

The Battery, the only one of Stella’s three structural panels to offer a view of the city from

inside the city itself, reflects this confusion. Here, Stella places us up above the park, as if we’re

looking down at the city from inside one of the tall public buildings that surrounded the park.”

The sharp arc marking the boundary between sea and sky is Stella’s representation of the long

enclosed piers, which locates us at Manhattan’s harbour. This, however, is a singular point of

order in this canvas. Stella’s foreground is littered with synecdoche. Crosshatched rigging lines

and masts indicate the presence of ships without showing the ships themselves. The abstract,

cubist water tower and the crudely silhouetted telegraph pole imply industry. The dominant
vertical line, just right of centre, is Stella’s rendering of 161-foot flagpole on which one of the

largest American flags of the era was flown – showing the pole without the flag implies

America, without showing America.

In comparison to the sharp rectilinear skyscrapers in The Prow, the glowing metallic cables

and instantly recognisable Gothic arches of Brooklyn Bridge, Stella’s sole depiction of the built

environment within the city itself shows the metropolis to be incoherent and amorphous. In his

analysis of Metropolis and the Mental Life, Georg Simmel suggests that, as a result of this

incoherence, the city-dweller develops “a blasé attitude” to protect themselves against the

constant assault of stimuli. The effect created by Stella’s reliance on synecdoche, his dulled

palette and comparative lack of structure in The Battery echoes the experience that Simmel

describes:

the blasé attitude consists in the blunting of discrimination […] the meaning and
differing value of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as
insubstantial. They appear to the blasé person in an evenly flat and gray tone;
no one object deserves preference over any other.

From the tangled emblems of industry, where each form fades into another abstraction without

being fully realised, to the massive flagstaff depicted without its flag, The Battery evidences

this brutal blunting of emotion and senses triggered by the inhuman heart of the metropolis.

In contrast to the dulled, blasé attitude of the three structural panels of The Voice of the City,

the two “lived” panels of Stella’s polyptych offer what Wanda Corn describes as a “hot

chromatic” “delirium”. In these images, the city’s urban environment has disappeared into a

blinding glare of lights. Here, Stella offers us the White Ways of New York, all the glitter and

dazzle of the Roaring Twenties.

in both White Way canvases are solid blocks of colour. Light, here, is so physical, that each

orange, white or yellow streak possesses its own black shadow. Despite reading Stella’s

dizzying central panels as celebratory of New York’s array of lights, both Wanda Corn and

Irma Jaffe view these instances of light-turned-solid as implicitly troubling. Jaffe describes

these bars as dominating “the surface plane”; for Corn, “our eye is halted by hard-edged bars

stretching from top to bottom like a prison door”. Light, here, is an impassable physical

boundary. While the perspective suggested by the crossed beams and converging lines of the

subway grid in Leaving the Subway seemingly invite the viewer into the painting, we are

perpetually held back by the strident white bars which dominate the foreground. Broadway

lacks even this dimension of perspective, consisting of the blue and red central dial and the

overlaid vertical orange bars. Although in these panels we should be thrown into the lived

experience of the modern metropolis, in these “lived” panels we are still held at bay, distanced

from the city itself.

This combination of aesthetic appeal – created by the bright, dazzling colours – and aesthetic

distance – created by the bars that run throughout these two panels, makes it difficult to view

these two White Way sections as celebrations of city life. The light and life of the Roaring

Twenties is, somehow, always situated just beyond our reach.

In many ways, however, this sense of striving towards an unreachable goal – of seeing the light

but not being able to grasp it – was reflective of the experience of the modern city itself. In a

city famous for its “White Ways” of electric light, hundreds of thousands of city-dwellers lived

in the dark. By the turn of the twentieth century, New York contained 350,000 dark rooms. In

the worst tenements of Manhattan, Daniel Freund notes, “41% of the stairs and rooms were
pitch black, 38% were very dark, and 21% were dark – a total of 100%”. In 1917, a pamphlet

on Planning Sunlight Cities observed that the Woolworth building cast a 1,635-foot shadow

over the city streets of New York, and the Equitable building – a lightning rod for criticism –

cast 7.59 acres into shadow. Much like us, as viewers of Stella’s White Way panels, New

Yorkers were left looking at the promise of light while being left, stuck in the dark.

Rather than celebrating the human experience of the modern metropolis, then, Stella’s lived

panels further the critique offered by his structural panels. All the fizz and energy promised by

the lights of New York is contained and ordered, placed teasingly beyond our reach.

Further, there is something slightly cynical about the lights that Stella depicts in order to

represent New York. The red and blue dial which dominates Broadway, for example, can be

seen as a recurrence of the synecdoche Stella employed in The Battery. With its twenty-four

beams emanating from a single green dot, this dial resembles a clock face. In 1917, the poet

John Curtis Underwood depicted the clock on the Metropolitan Life Tower as a “Clock in the

Air”, visible from the city’s “prison[s]” to the “open sea”. As Nick Yablon explains,

Underwood presents this “Clock in the Air” as an “inescapable presence in the lives of New

Yorkers”. According, according to Metropolitan Life’s own commemorative publication, this

clock was

wired to a “special transmitter” that enabled the searchlight to flash “minute

In situating this “Clock in the Air” behind the bright lights of Broadway, Stella reminds us that

in the modern metropolis, time consists of “standardized and abstract units that could be

synchronized, measured, allocated and exchanged”. In New York’s consumer capitalist culture,

Stella indicates, time is an ever-present concern, and a quantifiable commodity.

depiction of the lived experience of the modern metropolis. At the very top of the canvas, right

of centre, Stella presents a stick figure, fashioned in electric light, from an advertisement for

Wrigley’s chewing gum, which, the company claimed, was the biggest electric sign in the

world. Most of the top section of Broadway is composed of glowing yellow lettering,

mimicking the advertising signs that animated New York’s White Way. If Stella is, as he

asserts, interpreting “the voice of the city”, is “buy Wrigley Spearmint Gum” really all the

modern metropolis has to say?

In these two, seductively colourful “lived” panels of Stella’s polyptych, then, the lived

experience of the modern metropolis becomes one populated by signs of life, rather than life

itself. This, then, perhaps accounts for the rigidity and lifelessness of Stella’s polyptych: in

the place of human figures or anthropomorphic dynamism of the built environment, the

interwar metropolis offers only image of an image of the human figure, lifeless but electric,

created by corporate advertising.

This, then, is the vision of modernity offered by Stella’s Voice of the City: inhuman structures

animated by an unfulfilled promise of vibrant, electric life. Far from celebrating New York as

an icon of American modernity, The Voice of the City presents the modern metropolis, in

Joseph Stella’s own words, as “flimsy, derisory, ephemeral, insignificant as a child’s tracing”.

In his polyptych, then, Stella casts his interwar New York into the realm of hyperreality: the

challenge presented to us as viewers is whether we choose to be seduced by the promise of life

within the dark heart of the inhuman metropolis.