"Cow's Skull with Calico
Roses," Georgia O'Keeffe, 1932. Oil on canvas from the
collection of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Modern Art
and America:
WASHINGTON, D.C. - Both an overdue reminder of Alfred Stieglitz's
pivotal role in the development of American art and a showcase
for key artists he nurtured, this rewarding exhibition may well
be the most important art-historical display in any American
museum this year. The first full-scale museum examination of
Stieglitz's leadership in introducing Modernism to this country
as photographer, publisher, and gallery director, it features
superb examples of his skills with the camera and paintings by
artists he promoted.
Spread over a labyrinth of large galleries in the National
Gallery of Art's West Building, "Modern Art and America: "
explores the lively exchange of art and ideas that the great
impresario stimulated through a generous selection of European
and American works he showed in a series of Manhattan galleries
between 1908 and 1946.
There are, to be sure, fine examples of Stieglitz's celebrated
photographs, but the overall theme is the unique nature of his
enormous influence on early Twentieth Century American art. The
exhibition lays out in roughly chronological order, many of the
exact works Stieglitz exhibited in his New York City rooms - the
Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, known as 291 from its
address on Fifth Avenue (1908-1917); the Anderson Galleries
(1921-1925); the Intimate Gallery (1925-1929); and finally, An
American Place (1929-1946). These displays challenged American
audiences to consider new ideas about painting, sculpture, and
photography, and changed forever the course of our art.
The show was organized by the National Gallery of Art under the
deft and determined supervision of Sara Greenough, the museum's
curator of photography, with the assistance of Charles Brock, a
research associate, and in consultation with Juan Hamilton, whom
Georgia O'Keeffe befriended toward the end of her life. The
exhibition is the result of wide-ranging, imaginative detective
work: for example, a watercolor by Auguste Rodin, which could not
be located in Europe, was discovered in the kitchen of a home in
Connecticut. This extraordinary effort brought together, perhaps
for the only time ever, 190 works by means of which Stieglitz
sold America on modern art.
"Self-Portrait," Alfred Stieglitz, 1907. Platinum portrait.
"Modern Art and America" is on view through April 22 and will not
travel. It is sponsored by Deutsche Bank and Deutsche Bank Alex
Brown.
That corporate sponsorship is especially appropriate because
Stieglitz (1864-1946) was born in Hoboken, N.J., to German
immigrant parents. While studying engineering in Berlin in the
early 1880s he became fascinated with photography. On his return
to the US in 1890 Stieglitz became a leader in the effort to have
photography treated as a form of artistic expression.
Around the turn of the century he launched what was to become a
crusade by displaying his own photographs and writing articles
arguing the cause of artistic photography. He edited the
periodicals Camera Notes (1897-1902) and, most
importantly, Camera Work (1903-1917), a beautifully
designed journal that included influential essays on photography
and other arts.
In 1902 Stieglitz formed the Photo-Secession, an organization of
avant-garde, pictorial photographers committed to establishing
the artistic merit of photography, and he began mounting
exhibitions of their work. Urged on by his protégé, photographer
and painter Edward Steichen, in 1905 Stieglitz opened the
Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue as a place
to showcase their photographs. Both men believed that photography
needed to be seen in relation to other arts, so from the outset
291 provided exhibition space not only for photographs, but for
paintings, drawings, and sculpture. Steichen and Stieglitz, as
Greenough notes in the exhibition catalogue, "envisioned that
the...[gallery] would serve as an educational facility," which it
did.
From the start, Stieglitz "had the audacious belief that America,
as the most modern nation in the world, could and should be the
world's preeminent cultural force," writes Greenough. "And he was
certain that New York, the city of ambition, the place where the
hand of man - and the hand of modern man - was writ large, should
be its center." Carrying out that vision over the course of the
next four decades Stieglitz organized more than 190 exhibitions
in his Manhattan galleries.
He was a fascinating man. Self-centered, self-righteous,
opinionated, obdurate and charismatic, he was by any measure a
difficult person. But Stieglitz was an intrepid organizer and
tireless promoter of artists he admired and by focusing on the
work of a small group of highly gifted native talents, he
successfully sold modern art to a still-philistine American
public.
"Stieglitz possessed the most efficacious of all instruments of
power - an absolute faith in his vision," art critic Thomas
Craven wrote in 1934. "His crusading energy inspired and
impelled, yes, even shamed, people to buy pictures which, but for
his insistent talk, they would have scorned. He made collectors
and collections."
In the first few years of the 291 Gallery Stieglitz offered
varied shows of photographs and modern European art, affording
opportunities for comparisons. Steichen's photographs, such as
"'Rodin the Thinker' and 'Victor Hugo,'" 1902, exhibited at 291
in 1906, reflected the pictorialist ambitions of Stieglitz's
colleague, as well as the wide contacts the younger man had made
while living in Paris. Steichen (1879-1973) acted as Stieglitz's
agent in Europe, introducing him to celebrated contemporaries
like sculptor Rodin and avant-garde artists unknown in America,
such as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.
"My Egypt," Charles Demuth, 1927. Oil on composition board from
the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Starting in 1908 Steichen sent over exhibitions by Cézanne,
Matisse, Picasso and Rodin, several of which represented the
first exposure of their work on this side of the Atlantic.
Selections from these early installations, on view in the current
show, seem tame to our eyes, but their frank depictions of human
nudity and sensuality often shocked 291's audiences. "Stieglitz's
aim, however," says Greenough, "was not to sensationalize, but to
instruct artists and the American public about the fundamentals
of the new art and to provoke serious discussion."
In 1913, prompted in part by Stieglitz's pioneering exhibition,
the American Association of Painters and Sculptors organized the
famous Armory Show of modern European and American art.
Showcasing the work of many of the innovative artists who had
made their debuts at 291, it created a sensation.
Stieglitz declined to get involved in the massive exhibition at
Manhattan's 69th Regiment Armory, choosing instead to mount a
series of tightly focused displays before, during and after the
Armory extravaganza. They featured, respectively, the work of
John Marin (1877-1953), Stieglitz himself, and French
avant-gardist Francis Picabia.
Marin's energetic, semi-abstract watercolors of New York City,
especially images like "Woolworth Building, No. 31" (1912),
generated much interest and some controversy. Stieglitz's "The
Flatiron" (1902), "The Steerage" (1907), and "The City of
Ambition" (1910), deliberately exhibited to coincide with the
Armory Show to see how his own work stood up in comparison to the
latest developments in modernist painting, have since become
icons of American photography - and American art. Picabia's
then-controversial, colorful abstractions, which will come as an
eye-popping revelation to those unfamiliar with his
groundbreaking style, make one yearn for a major exhibition of
his work one of these days.
In the wake of the Armory Show, as several New York galleries
began to exhibit modern European art, Stieglitz charted a new
course for 291. With the assistance of Steichen and Mexican
caricaturist Marius de Zaya, he first exhibited even more
experimental art, epitomized by the sculpture of Romanian-born
Constantin Brancusi. "Sleeping Muse" (1909-11) and "Mademoiselle
Pogany" (1912) helped propel the little-known Brancusi toward his
current reputation as "the artist who defined the path of modern
sculpture," in the words of Philadelphia Museum of Art curator
Ann Temkin in her catalogue essay.
In 1914 Stieglitz and de Zaya mounted what the gallery impresario
called the first exhibition anywhere that presented African
sculpture - from Gabon and the Ivory Coast - as fine art rather
than ethnography. The next year Stieglitz organized a show of
work by George Braque and Picasso together with a reliquary
figure from Gabon and a wasp's nest. The current exhibition
includes partial reconstructions of these groundbreaking shows.
They document how the gallery director "sought to stimulate
debate about the relationships between art and nature, Western
and African art, and intellectual and supposedly naïve art,"
observes Greenough.
Stieglitz continued to exhibit European and American avant-garde
art during World War I, and launched 291, a magazine that
celebrated America as the world's most modern nation and
challenged readers to embrace the central role of the machine in
contemporary life. French dada artist Marcel Duchamp tried to
carry this idea a step further with a machine-made object - a
urinal entitled "Fountain" - but it was rejected by another
exhibition as not being a work of art. Stieglitz promptly showed
it at 291. A Stieglitz photograph and a 1964 edition of Duchamp's
readymade porcelain creation memorialize that notorious object.
After 1915, the failure of other New York galleries to show
American works and his own deep commitment to American artists
prompted Stieglitz to focus his activities on behalf of native
painters. In 1916 and 1917 he put together a series of
exhibitions featuring painters Marsden Hartley and Georgia
O'Keeffe and photographer Paul Strand. They effectively
summarized the changes in American art in the preceding decade.
An entire room, filled with works by Hartley (1877-1943),
documents the manner in which this modernist titan synthesized
elements of European modernism with his own experiences to
present a potent new vocabulary of form and color. This display
is the highlight of the show. Especially memorable are the works
the Maine-born painter created in response to the military pomp
and pageantry of the Kaiser's Berlin at the outset of World War
I. They culminate with his vivid, symbol-filled "Portrait of a
German Officer" (1914), which is Hartley's homage to his close
friend, Karl von Freyburg, a German officer who was killed toward
the beginning of the war.
Stieglitz's infatuation with the much-younger O'Keeffe
(1887-1986) began with his interest in her delicate charcoals and
watercolors, such as "Blue No. 1" (1916), an early abstract work.
Their relationship deepened as he exhibited her work in the
gallery and led, eventually, to their famous marriage in 1924.
Reflecting his view that young Strand (1890-1976) was a budding
superstar with an "original vision," Stieglitz displayed his
photographs in his gallery and reproduced them with words of
praise in Camera Works. With images ranging from shadowy
figures walking by Wall Street buildings to a blind woman caught
unaware on the street with a prism lens to close-up abstractions
like "Bowls" (1916), Strand was introduced as a major
photographer. These are among the most memorable images of his
illustrious career.
In spite of his energetic efforts to mount and publicize
innovative exhibitions, Stieglitz never made much money from his
galleries, relying on his first wife's personal wealth to keep
them afloat. The onset of World War I and declining attendance
forced him to close 291 in 1917.
After several years without an exhibition space, in 1921
Stieglitz began mounting shows of his own photographs and of
O'Keeffe's new works (such as "Blue and Green Music" [1921]) in
rooms borrowed from the owner of the Anderson Galleries on Park
Avenue. By this time Stieglitz had separated from his first wife
and O'Keeffe had moved in with him.
A few of the 330 subtly-lit close-ups he photographed of
O'Keeffe's hands, body, and face, 1918-1925, were displayed in
this new space. With graphic poses often mirroring Rodin's
drawings and sculptures, they form one of the most intense and
intimate records of a person in the history of the photographic
portrait.
Stieglitz and O'Keeffe strongly influenced each other's work
during this period, including his photographs and her paintings
of flowers, trees, hills, clouds, and buildings around the
Stieglitz family summer home on Lake George. His photograph
"Dancing Trees" (1922) and her painting "Autumn Trees - the
Maple" (1924) suggest the interaction between the two artists.
In a small rented room that he called the Intimate Gallery,
located in the same building that housed the Anderson Galleries,
Stieglitz organized a series of exhibitions from 1925 to 1929 of
the art of the so-called "Seven Americans," whose work he would
champion the rest of his life. These artists - Charles Demuth,
Arthur Dove, Hartley, Marin, O'Keeffe, Strand, and Stieglitz
himself - shared a deep commitment to creating art that would
express contemporary American life in new ways. They explored a
wide range of subjects, including abstract portraits, urban
scenes, and rural landscapes, and experimented extensively with
various materials.
Demuth (1883-1935), for example, executed idiosyncratic poster
portraits of Dove, Marin, and other figures from the cultural
world. In "Goin' Fishin'" (1925), Dove (1880-1946) assembled
bamboo, buttons, denim shirtsleeves, oil and wood on a
composition board in a fascinating picture.
Marin made watercolors and collages, like "Lower Manhattan
(Composition Derived from Top of Woolworth Building)" (1922),
employing bits of string and paper on watercolor backgrounds.
Stieglitz and O'Keeffe experimented with a variety of
photographic prints.
In 1929 Stieglitz opened An American Place at 509 Madison Avenue,
where for the 17 years until his death he presented monographic
exhibitions of works of the Seven Americans. Each year he almost
always included his "core" artists - Dove, Marin, and O'Keeffe -
interspersed with shows of works by Demuth, Hartley, Strand and
himself.
"Yet," Greenough observes, "with the onset of the Depression, and
the political and economic upheaval it created, the strong sense
of community that had characterized the years of the Anderson
Galleries and the Intimate Gallery dissipated and An American
Place began to feel less like a communal meeting place than a
sanctuary." Although his protégés tended to turn inward, with
Stieglitz urging them on, they produced much of their best, most
mature art during this period. "All of them," says Greenough,
"refined their techniques and purified their compositions,
looking for strong simple iconic forms...."
The National Gallery exhibition closes with a dazzling array of
familiar works by this group of American modernist titans that
were originally displayed under Stieglitz's aegis.
Among the highlights is Demuth's "My Egypt" (1927), immortalizing
the industrial landscape of his hometown of Lancaster, Penn., and
examples of his fine watercolors of flowers and fruit.
Dove's bold, vividly hued paintings, such as "That Red One"
(1944), reflected his singular vision and the inspiration of the
surroundings of his place on Long Island Sound.
Hartley, the strongest painter of them all, created powerful
images ranging from broad mountainscapes of New Mexico to massive
boulders of Dogtown on Cape Ann in Massachusetts to his
culminating masterpieces of his native state of Maine, such as
"The Wave" (1940) and several views of Mount Katahdin, created
1939-1940.
Working in both oil and watercolor, Marin's energetic, jiggling
lines and semi-abstract forms conveyed the ambience of settings
as varied as New York City, Taos, N.Mex., and the coast of Maine.
It is easy to see why critics admired what one called in 1938,
his "vitality... tumultuousness and pantheistic ardor...."
Strand, who was a key ally of Stieglitz in charting a new vision
for American photography, shared with the older man "the
modernist notion that art embodied a certain kind of truth that
could not be revealed in any other way," says Greenough. Strand
continued to show superb images, highlighted by "Ranchos de Taos
Church, New Mexico" (1931), at An American Place into the early
1930s. After a falling out with Stieglitz, Strand thereafter went
off on his own, combining photography, filmmaking, and political
activism for the remainder of his career.
The couple continued to visit Stieglitz's summer place at Lake
George, where her paintings like "Farm House Window and Door"
(1929) often seemed to mirror his photographs such as "Little
House, Lake George" (probably 1934).
Strains in their relationship led O'Keeffe to begin visiting New
Mexico in 1929. There, the brilliant light and vast expanses
stimulated larger, sharper and cleaner paintings of animal
skulls, churches, and religious crosses, such as her iconic
"Cow's Skull with Calico Roses" (1932).
Somewhat reconciled toward the end of Stieglitz's life, O'Keeffe
supported him through ill health, and after his death in 1946
oversaw distribution of his art collection and photographs to
museums around the country. The best print of every mounted
photograph in Stieglitz's possession when he died was given to
the National Gallery. The many outstanding examples in this
exhibition confirm his standing as one of America's most
important and skilled photographers.
"Comic Wedlock," Francis Picabia, 1914. Oil on canvas from the
collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
Some 110 works from the extensive Stieglitz collection that
O'Keeffe gave to the George Eastman House of International
Photography in Rochester, N.Y., are featured in "The Photography
of Alfred Stieglitz: Georgia O'Keeffe's Enduring Legacy," on view
at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Penn., through
May 20. A real treat for Stieglitz fans, the exhibition includes
a wide range of photographs from the 1890s to 1935: early
European work, images of Lake George and New York City, portraits
of O'Keeffe and others, and facsimiles of early autochromes and
black-and-white lanterns slides, as well as cameras used by
Stieglitz. There is a grand, 1920 view of an aloof, regal
O'Keeffe, posed in a black cloak and black hat, among other
highlights.
"Modern Art and America" is a fascinating exhibition that
demonstrates how Alfred Stieglitz, visionary leader, intrepid
organizer, and keen-eyed curator, helped shape the course of
modern art in this country. "For more than 30 years," observes
Greenough, "he...orchestrated one of the most influential
dialogues ever created in American art and culture. All 'Seven
Americans' drew profound support from the community that
he...fostered and deep inspiration from his own art. The vision
of a photographer...liberated, enlightened, nurtured, and perhaps
ultimately defined their world."
The exhibition is accompanied by an enormous, weighty catalogue
written by Greenough with contributions by 12 leading scholars
that place the artwork in historical context. Published by the
National Gallery of Art, the 612-page volume contains 136 color
images and 224 duotones. It sells for $55 (soft cover) and will
be a valuable source of information and inspiration for both
professional and lay students of American art.
At a symposium at the National Gallery on May 24 from 10:30 am to
5 pm, Greenough and five scholars will explore various facets of
this important, wide-ranging exhibition.
The National Gallery of Art is on the National Mall between
Third and Ninth Streets at Constitutional Avenue, NW. For
information, 212/737-4215.
