By-Products Plants

While studying art in Italy and France from 1909 to 1913, Joseph Stella was captivated by Italian Futurism, a movement that employed Cubism’s fragmented forms to express the mechanization and speed of modern life. After he returned to the United States, Stella used Futurism to convey the dynamism of American industry in paintings such as By-Products Plants, which depicts the factories that extract ammonia, tar, and light oils when coal is burned. Such mechanical processes fascinated Stella, and he later recalled, “opposite my studio was a huge factory . . . towering with the gloom of a prison. At night fires gave to innumerable windows menacing blazing looks of demons.” Stella invested his factory paintings with this sense of eerie mystery.