This summer I’m celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence with special articles covering American painters and their art. One of the strange facts of life in the UK and Europe is that remarkably few of their paintings are in our public collections, so I hope this will do a little to redress the balance and celebrate the rich cultural history of the USA.

This weekend’s pair of articles show a small selection of the eclectic paintings of an Italian-American who was one of William Merritt Chase’s most brilliant and successful pupils, and one of the fathers of modern American painting, Joseph Stella (1877–1946).

Born into a family of lawyers in southern Italy in 1877 as Giuseppe Michele Stella, his older brother emigrated to the USA to study medicine, and he followed suit in 1896. Like many migrants he stayed in New York City, but soon abandoned his medical training in favour of art. He started attending classes at the Art Students League in 1897, and enrolled in the New York School of Art the following year, where he was taught by William Merritt Chase. He attended Chase’s Shinnecock summer school in 1901, and one of his contemporaries was Marsden Hartley.

Stella proved talented, and a brilliant draftsman and illustrator, but grew unhappy in New York. In 1909 he returned to Italy, where he came into contact with Modernism, which was popular there at the time. After two years in Italy, in 1911 he moved to Paris, which was awash with Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism all in full swing. Then in the autumn/fall of 1912, he decided to give America a second try, and returned to New York City.

Stella was soon attracted to the dazzling electric lights of Luna Park (1913) on Coney Island, which had opened a decade earlier. The style he had brought from Paris was startlingly different from his earlier work, and Futurist.

That was followed by Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913), one of the earliest, and still among the greatest, of American Futurist paintings. Although it’s sometimes claimed that it was exhibited at the famous (even notorious) International Exhibition of Modern Art held in New York in early 1913 – known now as the Armory Show – Stella didn’t complete it until the autumn of that year, when it went on display in a private gallery in New York. His reputation among the avant-garde had been secured.

The following year, he painted Coney Island (1914).

Stella visited Europe and North Africa in the summer of 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War.

Later during the war, his motifs and style changed to concentrate on the smoky skies and factories of industrial America, for example in Telegraph Poles with Buildings from 1917.

Stella’s Bethlehem, painted in pastel in about 1918, shows the skyline and smoke of this city in Pennsylvania, from the mid-nineteenth century the centre of the US steel industry.

He also seems to have become involved in social campaigning at that time. Stella’s atmospheric charcoal drawing of Equal Work/Equal Pay from 1918 shows a woman and a man stenographer (typist, or possibly typesetters) working back-to-back in one of the dimly-lit clerical sweatshops.

Another pastel, Nocturne II from about 1919, is moving away from those smoky factories, but remains dark and quietly sinister.

That same year he painted this large almost Surrealist fantasy, Tree of My Life, which appears to have been influenced by the extraordinary paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. It’s filled with exotic plants and birds, and passages are densely patterned, as shown in the detail below.

Stella’s eclecticism knew no bounds. After that, he painted probably his best-known work, this Cubist geometric analysis of Brooklyn Bridge (1919-20).

His most extraordinary accomplishment is surely the number of different styles he used over any given period. From his earlier industrial settings came the Precisionism of Factories in about 1920-21.

In 1920-22, Stella completed a huge five-panel mural for the Newark Museum, titled New York Interpreted (The Voice of the City). Critics considered it to be the most successful attempt to show city life during the period between the wars.