Joseph Stella, an Italian immigrant, came to New York City when he was 19-years old, and fell in love with his newfound surroundings. Calling the city 'his wife," Stella's favorite depictions were the people and places of the fast moving and bewildering metropolis. Between 1912 and 1923, he made several paintings of the Brooklyn Bridge and Coney Island. He tried to capture the excitement he found on the city streets in his paintings. He often combined the techniques of realism, abstraction, and surrealism in order to captivate the commotion of city life. Stella saw the Brooklyn Bridge as a "force" of inspiration. Every aspect of it was magnificent, in a way words could hardly describe, as he wrote in his autobiographical notes:
"Steel and electricity had created this new world.
A new drama had surged from the unmerciful violations
of darkness at night, by the violent blaze of electricity…
The steel had leaped to hyperbolic altitudes
and expanded to vast latitudes with the skyscrapers
and with bridges made for the conjunction of worlds." (2)
