Nancy and I are just back from
seeing the new “Stieglitz, Steichen,
Stieglitz, Steichen,
November
10, 2010–April 10, 2011
Galleries
for Drawings, Prints, and Photographs, 2nd floor
Stieglitz was the first
photographer ever to have his work at the Met:
in 1928 he donated 22 of his own photographs, and that December he wrote
a letter to the curator of the MFA in
But this show is one that stands out, as it contains
incredible masterpieces from these three, related giants of the history of the
art of photography in
Rather than go on about how wonderful it is, I am instead going to present a series of images of the photographs in the show (that I have shamelessly stolen from the Met’s website about the show and the images from it). I have also included below a review by Karen Rosenberg of the show from yesterday’s New York Times.
I have included photographs of each of the artists (Steichen’s
photographs of Stieglitz and of himself; Stieglitz’ photograph of
So…enjoy the images, then go see the show! (You also may want to purchase the excellent
catalogue from the show, done by the curator, Malcolm Daniel: Stieglitz,
Steichen, Strand: Masterworks from the
Edward Steichen. Alfred Stieglitz at 291, 1915.
Gum bichromate over platinum print
Alfred Stieglitz. Music - A Sequence of Ten Cloud
Photographs, No. 1, 1922. Platinum
print
Alfred Stieglitz. The
Street, Fifth Avenue, 1900–1901, printed 1903–1904. Photogravure
Alfred
Stieglitz. From My Window at the
Alfred
Stieglitz. Georgia O'Keeffe—Torso, 1918. Gelatin silver print
Edward Steichen. Self-portrait,
1917. Platinum print
Edward Steichen. Woods
Interior, 1899. Platinum print
Edward Steichen. The
Flatiron, 1904. Gum bichromate over
platinum print
Edward Steichen. The Flatiron, 1904, printed
1909. Gum bichromate over platinum print
Edward Steichen. The
Flatiron, 1904, printed 1905. Gum
bichromate over platinum print
Edward Steichen. The
Little Round Mirror, 1901, printed 1905. Gum bichromate over platinum print
Alfred
Stieglitz. Paul Strand, 1917. Silver-Platinum print
Paul Strand. Garden
Iris—
Paul
Strand. From the El, 1915. Platinum
print
Paul Strand. Wire Wheel, 1917. Silver-platinum print
Paul Strand.
Like other major
American museums, the Metropolitan was slow to recognize photography, but Alfred Stieglitz gave
it a big push in the right direction. In 1928 this Photo-Secession pioneer
donated 22 of his own works to the Met. They were the first photos to enter the
collection.
A few years later, in
1933, Stieglitz made a larger gift of more than 400 works by his
contemporaries: Edward Steichen, Paul
Strand, Clarence White, Gertrude Käsebier and many of the other photographers
he had promoted in his New York gallery, 291, and his influential journal,
Camera Work.
The museum’s stunning “Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand,” mostly
drawn from the collection, gives us just the big three — the impresario and his
two greatest photographer discoveries. (Georgia O’Keeffe,
arguably his best find in any medium, appears as a portrait subject.) They were
a contentious group, if you could call them a group at all. Steichen made his
mark in the early years of 291, while
Organized by Malcolm
Daniel, the curator in charge of the Met’s photography department, “Stieglitz,
Steichen,
And though the
pictures come from the collection, the show has an impressive story arc about
photography’s coming of age. The exhibition segues from Steichen’s hazy,
nostalgic Pictorialism to
Stieglitz’s own
transition to a more clean-lined, geometric style is well documented in the
first and largest gallery, with a rich selection of
“Winter,
Nearly three decades
later he photographed the city from on high, looking out the windows of his
30th-floor apartment in the Shelton Hotel and his nearby 17th-floor gallery, An
American Place. Here the metropolis is brisk and orderly, if still a bit
alienating, epitomized by the neat scaffolding of a fast-rising skyscraper in
the distance.
The Met’s show
reaffirms that while Stieglitz was a great photographer, he was an even better
cultivator of talent. In 1900 a 20-year-old named Edward Steichen paid a visit
to Stieglitz on his way to
Although Steichen’s
shadowy nudes and foggy woods shared the fussy look of fin-de-siècle painting,
they were products of state-of-the-art photographic technology. He was a
virtuoso printer, employing as many different techniques and pigments as
necessary to produce the desired pastel-like effect. In the Met’s three large
exhibition prints of “The Flatiron” — the only ones known to exist — Steichen
used a combination of gum bichromate and palladium to envelop the downtown
landmark in Whistleresque mists of indigo and gray.
Back in
Steichen’s flair for
portraiture ensured a steady income stream and some excellent social connections.
After World War I he worked as the chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity
Fair; the Met has a smattering of these images, though its vision of Steichen
is filtered through Stieglitz’s collection.
For the same reason Paul Strand is represented by early
work, which fortunately is superb. Under Stieglitz’s direction he developed a
precise, “brutal” (to use Stieglitz’s word) aesthetic that was in tune with the
radical modernism of the 1913 Armory Show.
The Met has several of
Strand’s humanism —
nurtured early on by his teacher Lewis Hine at the
In 1929
The central dynamic of
“Stieglitz, Steichen,
“Stieglitz, Steichen,
Strand” continues through April 10 at the