Abstract: Variations on The Brooklyn Bridge: Joseph Stella, Hart Crane and Richard Benson

Abstract: Poems written about a painting form a long and established tradition, and delineating the boundaries and contacts between poets, painters, and their respective works is a rather fascinating undertaking. In this paper I will focus on the hypothesis of a relation between two main artists in Modern American: the painter Joseph Stella and the poet Harold Hart Crane, but above all, between The Bridge by Hart Crane and Joseph Stella’s The Bridge, (the Fifth Panel, 88 ¼ x54) in Voice of the City of New York Interpreted, 1920-22, a five-panel painting, oil and tempera on canvas 99.75 x 270 inches overall. Both the works, rightly defined among the best-known testimonials to America’s modern industrial landscape derived from an insatiable, perhaps obsessive, interest in one of the most representative icons of modern age: the Brooklyn Bridge designed by John Augustus Roebling will be set against Richard Benson’s picture The Brooklyn Bridge taken in 1930. The first to suggest that Crane was brought to create his bridge by Stella's work was Henry W. Welles, professor at Columbia University, following David Steinberg, a journalist for Newark Ledger, visiting Stella's exhibition at the Newark Museum, Brom Weber, in his famous biography of the author and the American art historian Irma B. Jaffe. In the present contribution, I will focus on these hypotheses and show how some complex and debated extracts from The Bridge by Hart Crane could be interpreted as an example of ekphrasis or inter-semiotic rendering of specific paintings by Joseph Stella offering, a critical and original revisitation and reformulation of the Modern American scene.