Factories at Night
Joseph Stella, Factories at Night, ca. 1936/1943, oil on canvas, Allocated by the U.S. Government, Commissioned through New Deal art projects, public domain, L43.6.12
This work is not currently on view.
- Title
Factories at Night
- Artist
- Date
ca. 1936/1943
- Medium
oil on canvas
- Dimensions (H x W x D)
35 1/4 in x 35 1/4 in
- Inscriptions & Markings
signature: Joseph Stella, brushed, lower right
- Collection Area
American Art
- Category
Paintings
- Object Type
painting
- Culture
American
- Credit Line
Allocated by the U.S. Government, Commissioned through New Deal art projects
- Accession Number
L43.6.12
- Copyright
public domain
- Terms
Early in his career, Joseph Stella was strongly influenced by the style and theories of Italian Futurists, whose works and manifestos celebrated the speed and dynamism of the machine age. While working in the Works Progress Administration, he was drawn to the bold, clean shapes of Pittsburgh’s industrial landscape with its factory towers and chimneys looming against the sky from which he made numerous sketches and oil paintings of these scenes. In Factories at Night, Stella employed a limited range of colors in order to focus on the massive cylindrical forms of the buildings and the clouds in mottled sky intersected by beams of light that draw the viewer’s eye upward. The hard edges of the work are blurred somewhat by Stella’s thin application of paint, lending this composition a certain element of theatricality.
