circles]." Collector and art educator Katherine Dreier included Stella among those artists whose work she sought to promote under the auspices of her Societe Anonyme, New York's first museum dedicated exclusively to advanced contemporary art, which opened its doors in 1920. In New York during the 1920s, Stella became fascinated with the geometric quality of the architecture of Lower Manhattan. In these works he further assimilated elements of Cubism and Futurism. In Brooklyn Bridge (1919–20), he shows his fascination with the sweeping lines of the Roeblings' bridge, a motif he used several years before poet Hart Crane turned to this structure as a symbol of modernity. Stella's depictions of the bridge feature the diagonal cables that sweep downward forcefully, providing directional energy. While these dynamic renderings suggest the excitement and motion of modern life, in Stella's hands, the image of the bridge also becomes a powerful icon of stability and solidarity. Among his other well-known paintings is New York Interpreted (The Voice of the City) (1922), a five-paneled work (almost twenty-three feet long and over eight feet high) patterned after a religious altarpiece, but depicting bridges and skyscrapers instead of saints. This work reflects the belief, common at the time, that industry was displacing religion as the center of modern life. The painting is in the collection of the Newark Museum. "At a time when virtually all modernists tried their hand at representing the city," Wanda Corn has written, "Stella's painting is the summa." In the 1930s, Stella worked on the Federal Art Project and later traveled to Europe, North Africa, and the West Indies, locations that inspired him to work in various modes. He restlessly moved from one style to the next, from realism to abstraction to surrealism. He executed abstract city themes, religious images, botanical and nature studies, erotic and steamy Caribbean landscapes, and colorful still lifes of vegetables, fruits, and flowers. Stella's works from his post-Armory Show period, however, were problematic for the cultivation of a sustained career. Once he had ceased painting in a Futurist or quasi-Cubist mode and had finished with his period of Precisionist factory images (circa 1920), he was not aligned with any particular movement. His concerns, as well as his approach to painting, became less timely, more personal and idiosyncratic. Tree of My Life (1919), like many later Stella works, is "baroque and operatic," a garden scene out of Bosch, and his