The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (460 page)

 
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(1877–1946).
Italian-born American painter. He emigrated to the USA in 1896, but from 1909 to 1912 he lived in Italy and France, where he had his first significant contacts with modern art. He was particularly influenced by
Futurism
and he became the leading American exponent of the style. His first and most famous Futurist painting was
Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras
(Yale University Art Gallery, 1913–14), a densely fragmented portrayal of a crowded amusement park at night. In such paintings Stella gave a romanticized image of the industrialized townscape of New York. In particular he was obsessed with Brooklyn Bridge, which he described as ‘a shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America’ (
Brooklyn Bridge
, Yale University Art Gallery, 1917–18). He soon abandoned the Futurist idiom, but industrial and urban themes continued to inspire him. Stella was active in the administration of two leading avant-garde associations—the
Society of Independent Artists
and the
Société Anonyme
—and in the early 1920s he experimented with various styles, including
Precisionism
. In the 1920s and 1930s he spent much of his time in Italy and France (he lived in Paris 1930–4). From the mid-1920s his work grew more conservative and included mystical and sacred subjects.

 
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stencil
.

A thin sheet of metal, paper, or other suitable material perforated with a design (or often lettering) that is reproduced on paper or fabric when the sheet is laid on them and colour is brushed through the openings. Until the
silk screen
was devised only simple shapes could be printed by the stencil technique; yet from the aesthetic point of view its very simplicity and sharpness of outline may become major virtues, and the process has a long history both for fabric printing and for the colouring of prints, especially
woodcuts
. In France, where it is called
pochoir
, stencilling has been much employed in book illustration.

 
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(1894–1966).
South African painter. She developed an
Expressionist
style in Germany, where she studied 1913–20, and was the most important figure in introducing European modernism to South Africa. She is represented in many collections in South Africa and in Europe.

 
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(1817–75).
English sculptor, painter, and designer, born at Blandford in Dorset, the son of a housepainter. With the assistance of the Rector of Blandford, Stevens was sent to study in Italy when he was 15 and remained there until 1842. He worked with
Thorvalden
in Rome, and laid the foundations of his style in the study of the masters of the
Renaissance
, above all
Raphael
. After his return to England he taught at the Board of Trade's School of Design, and worked as chief artist to a firm of bronze and metal-workers in Sheffield, then settled in London in 1852. In 1856 he entered the competition for the Wellington Monument to be erected in St Paul's Cathedral, and although his design was placed sixth, he was eventually awarded the commission. It occupied him for the rest of his life and was plagued with bureaucratic delays and misunderstandings. It was not finally completed until 1912, when the equestrian group at the top was cast from Stevens's model. Nevertheless, it is not only Stevens's masterpiece (indeed, the only one of his large schemes to come to fruition and survive), but also the greatest piece of sculpture produced in England in the 19th cent. The architectural elements form a splendid, bold composition, and the two bronze groups
Valour and Cowardice
and
Truth and Falsehood
have an almost
Michelangelesque
grandeur and vigour.
Apart from the Wellington Monument, Stevens's finest work was the decoration for the Dining Room at Dorchester House, London (
c.
1856), a sumptuous residence built for the millionaire R. S. Holford . It was demolished in 1929 (the Dorchester Hotel now occupies the site), but a fireplace is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, and many of the fittings are in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, which has an outstanding Stevens collection. He was a masterful craftsman in numerous media—marble, bronze, silver, porcelain—and was also a painter, although he destroyed much of his work because it did not satisfy him. His unexecuted designs included schemes for the decoration of the interior of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral and the Reading Room at the British Museum, recorded in his superb drawings, which are particularly well represented in Cambridge (Fitzwilliam), Liverpool (Walker), London (Tate), Oxford (Ashmolean), and Sheffield (Mappin). These drawings are very much in the High Renaissance tradition, and it is to this era that Stevens belonged in spirit.

 
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