Joe
Stefanelli.

About the Artist

The last man standing from that generation.

oe Stefanelli studied under Hans Hofmann in 1947 and never looked back. He shared a studio with Willem de Kooning, once carried an unconscious Jackson Pollock out of a bar, and was invited by Franz Kline to participate in the 1951 “9th Street Show” — the exhibition that formally announced Abstract Expressionism to the world. He was there for all of it. Not as a spectator. As a painter. When he showed at Lift Trucks in 2009 at age 87, he was described simply as “the last man standing among all the well-remembered, second-generation Abstract Expressionists.”

Born in Philadelphia, Stefanelli spent the postwar years in the Cedar Tavern orbit — the painters, the arguments, the ambition, the wreckage. His draftsmanship was rare among his peers: precise and committed in a world that increasingly prized gesture over structure. In 1967 he spent a year in Egypt, and that experience enters the work — vivid yellows, muted blues, a palette that carries heat. Works are held in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Tom Christopher and Stefanelli share representation at Galerie Barbara von Stechow in Frankfurt — a gallery whose program is built specifically around these two American painters. That professional relationship reflects a deeper affinity: both are painters who made their work outside the institutions, on their own terms, for as long as it took.

“The last man standing among all the well-remembered, second-generation Abstract Expressionists.”

Lift Trucks Art