At once a tribute to urban architecture, electric lights, and radio communication, Paul Gaulois’s nocturnal scene, Construction in Blue, evokes comparisons with Joseph Stella’s monumental Brooklyn Bridge (1941.690). Both artists moved to New York City—Stella from Italy, in 1896, Gaulois from the Midwestern U.S., around 1921—and were eventually drawn into Katherine Dreier’s orbit, which provided patronage and contact with international avant-garde art through her ever-growing collection. Gaulois, a self-taught artist whom a fellow modernist characterized as a "radio-futurist," found the European cubists’ prismatic compositions especially invigorating, just as the style had captivated Stella a decade earlier in France.