Seeing Coney Island, Seeing Culture: Joseph Stella's Battle of Lights

Figures

Figure 1.

“Helter Skelter,” Luna Park, 1905. Library of Congress.

Figure 2.

The Kaleidoscopic Tower, Luna Park, 1904. Museum of the City of New York.

Figure 3.

Joseph Stella, Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913–14). Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Collection Société Anonyme.

Figure 4.

Detail from Battle of Lights.

Figure 5.

The “Flip Flap,” Coney Island, 1900. Library of Congress.

What do you see? This is one of the first questions that Jules Prown would ask of his students—and it remains one of the most profound and enduring. Its importance in art history is obvious. Jules Prown has always stressed that scholarly investigation should begin with close formal analysis of the object and only then proceed to the framing of larger questions and hypotheses. I would argue for the importance of this method—and the still broader concern with what is seen—in the entire domain of cultural history. The question “What do you see?” can lead to new understandings of the importance of visual evidence, visual thinking, and visual experience in comprehending the life of a culture. Think only how different the whole field of history would be if visual texts were used, not as mere illustrations, selected to confirm what has been previously determined through written sources, but instead as points of entry and springboards for speculation. Visual objects, whether magazine engravings or museum oils, posters, postcards, or steam engines, then assume dynamic qualities as active participants in a complex process of aesthetic and cultural experience, pleasure, and controversy. Cultures communicate through objects, and if we are to understand them at all, we must attend to objects. Learning to see objects is the necessary first step in learning to think with them.

My convictions in these matters were early strengthened by personal experience The inspiration for my first major historical project (a dissertation co-directed by Jules Prown—later a book—on technology and American republican values) ¹ sprang from a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the winter of 1968 where I saw K. G. Pontus Hultén’s brilliant exhibition, “The Machine—as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.” So too my second scholarly project, a short book on Coney Island and the emergence of modern mass culture at the turn of the century, ² was sparked by a painting that I knew from my graduate-school days at Yale, Joseph Stella’s Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras (1913–14).

This painting intrigued and puzzled me long before I thought of writing about Coney Island. It seemed both extraordinarily intense and tantalizingly ambiguous. Even though I had not consciously studied it—not fully seen it in the way that Jules Prown had taught me—I found it haunting. About four years after I left Yale, its memory came sharply back as I began to think about the origins of modern mass culture. It flashed like a beacon in my mind, beckoning to me, as to the crowds it depicted, to pursue the answers to my questions at Coney Island.

Stella himself had arrived at Coney by a circuitous route. Born in 1877 in a mountain village near Naples, he had first come to New York at the age of eighteen under the wing of his elder brother. He worked for several years as an illustrator, recording, among other scenes, immigrant “types” at Ellis Island and life in industrial Pittsburgh before returning to Europe in 1909 in an effort to find his bearings as an Italian and as an artist. Soon, however, his devotion to the tradition of the Old Masters was shattered by his exposure to the Italian Futurist movement, French Cubism, and modernism generally. When he arrived once again in New York in 1912 inspired by these influences, he saw afresh the artistic possibilities of...