Joseph Stella, street photography exhibits opening this fall at Norton

The Norton Museum of Art will host the debut in October of a major new exhibition focusing on nature-themed work by the 20th-century American modernist Joseph Stella, the museum announced earlier this month.

Also planned in October is an exhibit of fashion and street photography from the holdings of the Swiss collector Nicola Erni, who opened a private museum in Steinhausen, Switzerland, in 2013 to showcase the various artworks she has amassed over the past two decades.

A Personal View on High Fashion and Street Style: Photographs from the Nicola Erni Collection, 1930s to Now, opens Oct. 8 and runs through Feb. 12. Joseph Stella: Visionary Nature, opens Oct. 15 and is on view until Jan. 15.

Norton CEO Ghislain d’Humières said in a prepared statement that the two fall exhibits “provide insight into major artistic movements of the 20th century, and demonstrate the Norton’s commitment to bringing important, major exhibitions spanning diverse genres to Palm Beach and the region.”

Stella (1877-1946), who emigrated from southern Italy to the United States as a teenager in 1896, is best-known for his canvases of New York City, which were inspired by the Futurist movement in his native Italy. That intellectual movement glorified the vigor, power and violence of the modern industrial age, and Stella’s colorful, dramatically lit paintings of Coney Island and the Brooklyn Bridge have become visual icons of modernism.

But Stella also was deeply interested in plant and animal life, and Visionary Nature features 90 paintings and works on paper including renderings of waterlilies, tropical flowers and swans, as well as religious-themed works such as Purissima (1927), a painting of the Virgin Mary that echoes early Christian art.

“The Stella exhibition is the first in-depth exploration into the artist’s fascination with the natural world,” d’Humières said. Curated by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pa., the exhibit will travel to those two museums after its debut at the Norton.

The Erni exhibit will feature nearly 300 works by more than 100 different artists, including major photographers such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Cindy Sherman and Bill Cunningham. The show traces the history of fashion photography from the early 20th century to the 1980s, when photographers looked outside traditional boundaries to explore changes in street fashion style. Erni began assembling her collection in the 1990s, focusing first on the 1960s and 1970s photographs that documented that era’s jet-set celebrity culture.

Some of the works in the exhibit will be displayed through thematic content, as the show examines how the photos represent ideas of “fantasy, romanticism and provocation,” Norton officials said.

“The Nicola Erni Collection is a globally celebrated collection that brings together the divergent worlds of fashion and street photography, exploring glamor and style through the lens of some of the greatest photographers of the last century,” d’Humières said.

Also on view this fall is an exhibition of the work of Moroccan photographer Lalla Essaydi. Her show, Un/veiled, features portraits of Arab women adorned by the artist with henna calligraphy. (July 23-Nov. 6). Meanwhile, the African-American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner is the subject of Intimate Pictures (Aug. 20-March 12), an exhibit of four works including Christ at the Home of Mary (1937), recently acquired by the Norton.

On view from Sept. 10 to Jan. 15 is Autumn Mountains and the Light of the Harvest Moon, four paintings by Chinese artists offering their interpretations of the landscape tradition in Chinese art. The show includes two contemporary artists as well as the 18th-century artist Zhang Yuan, and the 19th-century painter Zhou Kai.

The Norton Museum of Art, 1450 S. Dixie Highway in West Palm Beach, is open from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday; from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Fridays, and from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sundays. The museum is closed Wednesdays and holidays. General admission is $18, $15 for seniors, and $5 for students with valid ID.  

Call 561-832-5196 or visit www.norton.org for more information.  

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Joseph Stella, photography exhibits planned for Norton Museum