American Masters; ALFRED STEIGLITZ- The Eloquent Eye

On Washington's Birthday in 1893 a great blizzard gray DGD in New York. I stood on a corner near Fifth Avenue watching the lumbering stagecoaches appears through the blinding snow and move northward on the avenue. The question formed itself. Couldn't what I was experiencing see be put down with the slow plates and lenses of as the like was denied knowing that where there is light one can photograph. I decided to make an exposure. After three hours of standing in the blinding snow I saw the stagecoach come struggling up the street. The driver lashing his horses onward at that point. I was in the early out of my head but I got the exposure I wanted. Later at the New York society of amateur photographers before my negative was dry I showed it with great excitement. Everyone laughed. Fuck sakes let's throw that damn thing away.

It's all blurred I'm not sure. I told them the negative is exactly as I want it to be. What I was driving at had nothing to do with blurred or sharp. What Stieglitz was driving at. It was a new vision for a modern world. To teach America to see and photography was the epitome of the new rave scene. He is known as the father of modern photography. But for this rebel against complacent acceptance of the past photography was not enough. In Paris a visual revolution was brewing in the early 1900s. A revolt against outmoded conventions in art. Stiglitz knew the future when he saw it he would boldly introduce these Afghan God works to America to shock the world of the arts out of its blind attachment to the past. And to open the eyes of America to the

20th century. This is legendary. Complex difficult full of contradictions inspired either devotion or irritation. The gentlest and kindest of men. Stieglitz could be autocratic and brutally critical. Critics claim that his selfless devotion to art was matched by his devotion to his own famed. Stieglitz noble idealism wrestled with his human frailties. For he was above all intensely human. I was born in Hoboken. I'm an American. Photography is my passion. The search for truth is my obsession. From 1893 to 1895 I often walked around the streets of New York

downtown. Near the East River. Taking my hand camera with me. I loathed the dirty streets and yet I was fascinated. I wanted to photograph everything I saw. Wherever I look there was a picture that moved me. The second hand clothing shops the rag pickers the tattered and torn. All found a warm spot in my heart. Above all there was the burning idea of photography pushing its possibilities. Even the food. Was photographing all I was trying to do something. Who thought I could do that. Then one time when you couldn't go. He was out there by himself. Stiglitz was in his element when overcoming difficult weather and like conditions. He always saw himself as a rebel even

as a young photography student in Berlin in the early 1880s Stieglitz challenge the existing limits on photography. His wealthy father who had been born in Germany had sent him to Berlin to study mechanical engineering. Stieglitz quickly abandoned engineering. When he fell passionately in love. With photography. The camera fascinated me first as a passion then as an obsession. I found that I was the master of the elements that I could do things that had never been done before. I worked day and night for graphic. Very interesting because I was always trying new things. Trying to. Set up this camera. In the dark and left it for a day or two to see if anything would be record of the thaw. During things like. Most of them think they were.

With a generous allowance from his father. Stieglitz spent some of his happiest years travelling and photographing in Austria and Italy. I worked like one possessed people called me that crazy American. I didn't see why the grass could not be a work of art and I studied to make it work. He sent. Pictures to every place where the prize was given. And when he got all the medals and all the prizes there was half a shoebox full of them. I suppose you're become more quality about them. Well stable it was called back from Berlin in 1890. The death of his favorite sister. He was really not reading inside of himself but he

realized he was 26 years old and he was aware that the family wanted him to settle down and have been married and all the rest yielding to family pressure Stieglitz try to be a businessman and a husband he would fail at both. In 1893 he married Emmeline Overmeyer close friend of the family and wealthy heiress. From the start of their natures were in conflict. And malign. Prudish bourgeois to the core. Stiglitz anarchistic in full rebellion against the conventional society and he held dear the disaster of their 1894 honeymoon in Europe. Forecasts the disappointments of their marriage. And. Envisioned the man. With the news of the break. Dinners at chic restaurants. Stieglitz interested only in photography dragged his tearful bride to remote Hamlets for peasant harvest scenes.

And to distant lonely shores. And he was often miserable. But the honeymoon trip resulted in some of Stieglitz finest early work. The birth of their daughter Kitty who as a child was a favorite subject of his photography. Did little to heal the rift. Stieglitz a passion for photography left him little time or taste for family life with his camera. He roamed New York. In my early work. I wanted to document the NewYork of transition the old gradual passing into the new. The spirit took something that in years New York the one who really loves it. A sense of greatness a sense of being the metropolis of the country and therefore of the whole new world came into being. New York

City. The idea existed that New York was typical of modernity typical of the promise of the future. At the very turn of the century another idea began to filter into public awareness that the the very greatness of New York City was awaiting its visual representation in the arts school of New York artist who would represent and reproduce in the permanent form of visual images of this very exciting and unique place. It was the American impressionist artists who first began to explore New York City as a subject. The Impressionist New York was the New York of Fifth Avenue. Fashionable. The New York of Henry James. York elevated to. Lights in. The ash can artists.

They stood on the pavement. And they looked at the city and they painted. But it was photography that would form our modern vision of the city. I determined that photography would be accepted as art. However for many critics photography was more of a threat than a promise. Photography has become the refuge of every would be painter to Elin Dowd and too lazy to complete his studies by invading the territory of art photography has become its most mortal enemy. The photographer has discovered a machine to make his masterpiece of art for him by sticking his head into a black box and letting the machine do everything. The fight for photography became my life. Was far from the minds of those making family snapshots early in the century

by the camera and its slogan. To the eye dinner in photographer and the professional intent on pleasing his client. The camera was a means to make a living. It was not art but social reform that sent pioneer documentary photographer Jacob Reese into the darkest slums of New York. And Lewis Hine deep into the coal mines to shed light on the children who labored there for all these. The camera was a machine to record faithfully what it saw yet to a small but growing number of photographers proudly proclaiming themselves as amateurs. This machine could produce art. They were to prove it by making their pictures as much like paintings as possible. Called pictorial listen. Their movement was the modern avant garde photography of its time.

Steven says photographs are significantly different from any pictorial photographers. Students often turned his camera on the subjects that were immediately around him and most of his photographs were emphatically of their time. No.2 was certainly a watershed year for statelets a real turning point. It was then his impatience with the lack of seriousness on the part of most of the camera club members really wild over. He was being thwarted to impose his dictatorial way. His very high standards of what photography

should be and so he decided early in 19 0 2 that he would form a an elite body of photographers those whom he respected most Edward Steichen and Clarence why were two cases of beer to name a few of the most prominent. This group was to be the photo session meaning essentially of Onkar. Stieglitz believe that if he could find a talented painter who was also devoted to photography as art it would help the cause. And Edward Steichen was that man Steichen became his closest collaborator. What drew Stiglitz and Steichen together was a passion for photography that started at the beginning of the century. Stiglitz valued Steichen as this creative innovative imaginative energetic wonderful young man who produced beautiful photographs. And was a painter Steichen was stabilises fair haired boy the wonder boy photography whole additions of camera

work devoted to him he could do no wrong so long as he was a loyal follower Stieglitz always knew the power of publication camera work was a major weapon in his battle for photography. Camera work was without any question one of the most beautiful magazines of any sort ever produced. The reproductions the photo of yours or hands pasted onto the pages. Everything. Was a cause. Absolutely the highest standard. Great seriousness wonderful writers. The magazine had a tremendous impact. Each issue would have been passed from hand to hand. A treasured document and this was something that has been of tremendous importance to many many photographers in shaping their work. All the camera work and the photo session were internationally acclaimed Stieglitz

true ambition was to create a great international celo of Photography in New York to rival or eclipse those of Europe but suitable space was impossible to find or afford. With his close collaborator Edward Steichen a solution was found they would arrange a continuous series of highly selective international photography exhibitions in some rooms at 291 Fifth Avenue which they would convert into galleries to this time. Nothing like this had ever been attempted. Both of course took full credit for its meaning. Here's an idea because each of them had that kind of a personality and denying that the other one had that much to do with it. But the fact is they really collaborated. On the evening of November 5th 905 the little galleries of the photo session opened an exhibition. It amounted to a miniature but super Herbsaint of American photography and it

made photographic history. For the first time Americans had a continuing opportunity to see masterpieces of photography from both Europe and America. 291 was a great success but to my dismay jealousy soon became rampant among the photographers around me. They had come to believe that my life was to be dedicated solely to them. He quickly began to feel that they were becoming complacent that they were

assuming themselves to be much better than Stieglitz thought that they were and that they weren't pushing there are they weren't challenging it. And he began to think about exhibiting work by other artists from the time. After Steichen went to Europe a big time more or less the finder of art materials especially not photographs to send back. To. Tonight it was. Alfred who was there all the time was able to take care of the selection of photographs and moved his energy and his days entirely to the gallery. Stieglitz was in no hurry to go home. He made no secret of the incompatibilities of his marriage to Emmeline. He complained of her lack of interest in his work. Her hostility to many of his closest colleagues that she resented spending money on ne'er do well artists.

Well yes. You don't spend money on artists. They really are supposed to do better if they're a little hungry. Stiglitz prided himself on not using Emmy's money for 291 or camera work covering expenses with his own income from his father subscriptions and print sales. For five years from 1982 to 19 07. Stiglitz rarely used his camera promoting other photographers at the sacrifice of his own work. Now a shipboard experience would stir him to create one of his most memorable images. Enjoy 19 0 7 My wife our daughter Kitty and I sailed for Europe. My wife insisted on going on a large ship fashionable at the time. It was impossible to escape the nouveau Rishi. He guides by the third day out I could stand it no longer. I had to get away. I walked as far forward as possible.

Coming to the end of the deck. I stood alone looking down. There were men women and children on the lower levels of the steerage. The scene fascinated me. A round straw hat the funnel leaning left the stairway leaning right white suspenders crossed on the back of a man below a mass that cut into the sky completing a triangle. I saw shapes related to one another. A picture of shapes and underlining at a new vision that held me. I raced to the main stairway of the steamer chase down into my cabin picked up my graphics race back again wary and whether or not the man with the straw had shifted his position. If he had the picture I saw it would no longer exist. The man with the straw hat had not stirred an inch. The man in the cross suspenders. He too stood where he had been talking. No one had moved. I had only one plate holder with one unexposed

plate. I released the shutter. My heart thumping. If I had captured what I wanted it would be a picture based on related shapes and deepest human feelings. I stepped in my own evolution. Nineteen no seven was a memorable year in Paris. A time affirming. Experiment. And excitement. Picasso was painting that Them was the devil in your my t says photo paintings were causing a furor. The great 19 0 7 series on retrospective was transforming Modern Art. It would be Stieglitz real introduction to the Paris ever omg out that same year a very important gallery in Paris was showing says water colors and Steichen and I want to see them.

As we entered I saw what appeared to be pieces of blank paper with scattered blocks of color on them. I asked the gentleman in charge there cost. I learned only later that he was one of the outstanding connoisseurs in the French art business. He replied A thousand francs. I answered facetiously. You must mean a dozen. There's nothing there but empty paper with a few splashes of color. The man turned on his heels. I knew I had been absurdly stupid Stieglitz might not get it but he was always drawn to the new and ready to promote it especially if it was likely to shock a bourgeois public. The sculptor Haldane gave him that opportunity Steichen had photographed rode in numerable times and had photographed the sculpture. Steichen was very close to wrote that sort of foster son. He told him about the new gallery we had in New York and that we hope to soon have an exhibition of his drawings Rodin I was very

pleased and promised to let Steichen select whatever he wanted. This exhibit of Rodin's drawings was one of the first introductions of modern art to America. The show opened January 2nd 19 0 8 and caused a sensation. We had the wrong bag and there were cracked in a great need of attention to remove all of her old gray or most of it was Jewish and. A critic. Had a field day. These drawings should never have been shown anywhere but in the sculptor's studio. They are most decidedly not the sort of thing to offer to public view. Even in the gallery. It was in a very scandalous exhibition in the minds of many New Yorkers at the time not only because the drawing seemed to be. Very unfinished but also because they were clearly studies of

models who had been. Prancing before Rodin in his studio. Among the visitors to the little dance show was a young art student in Georgia who would one day change the course of Stieglitz life. There girlie you're going to one of the boys came in and said Then we wanted to go down to 291. And see the road drawings. All the teachers at the league were sending the students guard there. Because they said. It might be something that might not be a good thing but we shouldn't miss it. So we won't go in there. And that was what agrees with this man coming out of his hair stood up on top of his head. He looked very angry when he looked at us. And said we want to see the. Drawings. Well they said they were in there and. Well I went in there and. I looked around and. I didn't see anything like anything I'd been taught. Looked to me like just a lot of scribble.

Vote from Paris have another cracker jack exhibition for you. Drawings of the most modern of the Moderns. Abstract to the limit. Here was the work of a new man with new ideas. A very anarchist in art. There are some female figures that seem to condemn this man's brain to the limbo of artistic degeneration and subhuman hideousness. His line. It zigzags simplifications evidently derived from the Japanese is swirling and strong. The New York World was sorely in need of an irritant and Matisse certainly proved a timely one.

When a Paris art dealer agreed to an exhibition of SES on watercolors in 1911 Stiglitz was curious to see how the pieces of paper he and Steichen had laughed at for years before would look on the walls at 291. The box of frames says eyes was opened and lo and behold I found the first one no more nor less realistic than a photograph. What had happened to me. I realized then with the years that 291 had really done for me. 291 was a space that Ares could learn what this art was all about and they could begin to run into one another so a certain kind of social circle developed around 291 with Stiglitz and the art that he was showing at the center. There wasn't any other place where people were not doing just academic things. And the things that you saw as his place moved you off into the world. Just like his conversation did he collected around

him groups of people who were among the most creative intelligent people of their time and not just artists not just photographers and painters but critics poets musicians. He brought all these people together and fared on the extraordinary interchange of ideas that occurred in these spaces. It was a kind of excitement and argument that Stupak put in the air. It was the post when you're caught of. Something that would help you to take your own rolled up was the only place that you could go to find it. Part of the enjoyment that our friend derived out of running the 291 was the sense of communal work with his friends and he had always dreamed of making that kind of community and to a great extent 291 became that kind of a place where

there was a free exchange of ideas and this was a kind of ideal that really went back to his roots and his father's home because Stiglitz grew up. In a home where his father who was a very successful merchant was himself a painter. His father was very generous with artists. Stiglitz mother shared her husband's interests in the arts as well as his preference for Alfred her eldest son. This tender portrait reflects Stieglitz deep feeling for his mother. Oaklawn family summer home at Lake George. I always welcome artists. And Alford of course then grew up and in an atmosphere of respect. Active respect for art. So it was a natural thing for him to feel that this was something that he could carry on.

For visitors to 291 the cafes of Greenwich Village downtown were often the next stop. Bunny's restaurant in Greenwich Village Bohemian spirits provided New York's answer to a countys in cafe. Here and in the Golden Swan better known as the hellhole voices in glasses were raised radical ideas in art and politics. Hotly debated the endless talk found its way into print in publications vital to American modernism became a kind of hope a center for a new kind of culture in New York. It was in opposition to the dominant what I would call brownstone culture of Victorian America or of birth was New York. And it was that. The next generation a group of men and women who thought of themselves as a generation in rebellion against their bourgeois parents. And they wanted something more. The past needed to be criticized the past needed in some sense to be

overthrown and so a sense of rebelliousness and indeed a revolution came along here. It was cultural as well as political. Stiglitz can be included among those who identified themselves as anarchists. This is anarchy isn't for him it a kind of intense individualism going his own path a kind of sense of continuous rebellion rebellion against his background rebellion against anything that is conventional. Stiglitz recognized him because so much Greek spirit in 1911 Stieglitz gave the artist his first one man show in America at 291. On New York reeled from the shock. Any sane criticism is entirely out of the question. The results suggest the most violent wards of an asylum for maniacs. The craziest emanations of a disordered mind the jibbering of a lunatic. The apostles were on sale for between twenty and forty dollars. I sold one

single one a drawing made when he was 12 years old. Another I bought myself. I was ashamed for America to return them all. The whole collection could have been had. For $2000. What a pity that these pictures of Picasso as evolution were not kept together in this country. I suggested to the director of the Metropolitan Museum that they should be. He saw nothing in the caso and was sure that such mad pictures would never mean anything in America. The Metropolitan Museum had refused to buy the Picasso but in 1910 for Stieglitz a far more important purchase crowned his twenty year struggle for the entry of photography into an American Fine Arts Museum the Albright Gallery bought 15 photographs accepting our condition that the photographs be hung on a regular basis on an equal footing with the other arts in the gallery.

It's been one. Although pictorial had served to open museum doors by the time victory had come. Stiglitz was convinced that it was the photography of the past. Once it begins to show Marty's Rodin's watercolors 291 and he realizes that there is a whole new vision that is coming into being in the visual arts. He is really infused with that spirit of experimentation that spirit of the finance of convention. In the other visual arts and painting that he wishes to photography to align itself with that spirit it is high time that the stupidity and sham in pictorial photography be struck a solar plexus blow claims of art won't do. Let the photographer make a perfect photograph and if he happens to be a lover of perfection that disappear when the resulting photograph will be straight and

beautiful. A true photograph. Camerawork reflected the change in Stieglitz vision. It moved away from photography to publish more and more avenue garde art resentful photographers cancelled their subscriptions. Camera work was well known for publishing distinguished writing on the arts. But this new modern art demanded writing as radical as its images. I plan to publish a special number of camera work showing the pictorial evolution of Matisse and Picasso but I didn't know where to find a literary matter to go with the pictures. One day a woman brought me some writing that had been rejected by every publisher in town. The woman handed me a manuscript about Picasso. This one was one who was working. This one was one having something being coming out of him. Something had been coming out of him. Certainly it was something.

Certainly it had been coming out of him. Certainly it was something I don't know the meaning of this but it sounds good to me. Would you have brought somehow fits into the volume I have in mind. It was the first time anything of mine had ever been published anywhere. The first real competition to the gallery at 291 came in 1913 with the great Armory Show in New York City bringing together from here and abroad. The greatest collection of modern art ever seen in this country. At first Stiglitz was very supportive goods had been working for for the last five years in this country and to that time had been a person who had on a really serious level of showing work to the American public.

The greatest number of works were impressionist post-impressionist. Cubist. Two hundred and ten American works were shown. But it was the european that the papers carry. The artists were either fakes insane or anarchists or all three. Picture new Descending a Staircase became a favorite target. The negative publicity drew enormous crowds more than 87000 people in New York alone. Patrons were paying large prices for the same European paintings that Stiglitz had returned unsold to Paris.

Work isn't art until enough noise is made about it. Until someone rich comes along and buys it. After the great success of the Armory Show a number of dealers began showing more and more modest work and Stiglitz felt that he had accomplished what he had set out to do. The Armory Show was not only a watershed for Modern Art in the US it was a turning point for Alfred Stieglitz and American art. The European moderns had achieved success but only a fraction of the work sold were American. America's Avalon guard was still unappreciated and undervalued. The rebel needed a new car and it was waiting for him. He Alfred Stieglitz would lead the campaign for American art. Not in the name of chauvinism but because one's own children must come first. American Art had not been ignored at 291 between 9000 No Wait in

1914 in what were called the biggest small rooms in the world. Stiglitz gave pioneer American moderns their first public recognition. John Marin Max Weber Abraham walk away it's Arthur dove Marsden Hartley Alfred Moore. Knowing how limited were his resources in 1999 his discerning eye would select three young painters with the greatest potential to whom he would become a mentor protector father or friend. Seven years later he would discover the fourth. This time the artist was a woman. Well it was Stiglitz is great gambler's hunch that if he could invest his home and his support in these young Americans in O'Keefe in Harlem and. In Meran. There were four very gifted individuals and if somehow through his efforts he thought if he could

allow them to develop in their own way that they would make a lasting contribution. And in the end Stiglitz was right. Beginning with John Marin the story of the celebrated Stieglitz circle is unique in the history of American modernism. I first met John Marin in Paris a 19 0 9 we had shown his watercolors at 291 the year before his early etchings were in the wish Lyrian manner. But his new phase was free bold and distinctly Mara. I said why didn't you send something like that to me. When my dealers were here recently and saw this they threatened to get rid of me if I did any more wild stuff like this. I remarked Mr. Martin you are an American you are an artist. If I had your gifts I would see anyone in hell who tried to interfere with me. I had no idea that within a matter of months when Marin came to New York our

lives would be interwoven and the basis of a lifelong friendship. Would have taken root. And he saw the potential in Meran. To capture the energy that was to be New York. And it was Marins great gift to that generation then to look out in the city and to begin to liberate his line and find his line moving in the staccato rhythm of the modern city. These buildings move me. They must have life. Thus the whole city is alive. Buildings people all are alive. Free with. All. Their money by the. Time. Stick with. Yourself. I can clear.

UP THE LAWYER. Arthur dove struggle as an artist would be the most difficult of the Stieglitz circle before dove went to Paris. He was an illustrator and as much as $15000 a year and after Dov gave up his illustration work to paint his father's house. If you can afford to give up such an income you need not expect anything from me and promptly cut off any support and cut him out of his will without a cent so Dad was really without resources and he is living in Westport Connecticut he's working at a chicken farm. He is putting in 12 hour days heavy manual labor. There's very little time to work and to pursue many of these breakthroughs. Dobbs first abstractions. Were unusual there's almost no explaining how or why he came to it but soon after the show of his

work. At the 291 gallery in 1010. He picks a very limited palette. Greens and browns earth tones and he begins to paint the moment that nature awakens to him and the uniqueness and the originality of that invention stunned. New York. Today. Arthur Dove is acclaimed as America's first great. Painter. Stieglitz felt it was vital to recognize the very finest artists. He was a passionate speaker who would go off on him with great charisma for hours at a time trying to make the point. Why the work of artists who were long dead.

Who cannot benefit from the purchase. Why not help artists who are alive who need the money now in order to do more work. He kept a running fund into which he put money he received from the sale of his own prints a percentage of the sale price of every work he sold from the gallery. Some of the money from his own independent income and use that fund to help the artist in any way he could. Like Marin and Marsden Hartley discovered an utterly new world at 291. I had come down from Maine with a set of paintings. I told Stiglitz that I wanted to show nowhere else that the spirit of no other gallery was of any interest to me. And I swore that I could live on four dollars a week. Well I'm amazed to hear anybody be so. Simple as to be willing to live on four or five dollars a room. Well of course.

For years Hartley's ardent desire was to go to Europe Stieglitz made it happen when he was an exciting international group of artists. He explained. He does He is a German officer series. That have tremendous surrounding significance for the modern movement. And it was like a brass band and the calls of. The fourth member of The Secret Circle would arrive through an intermediary. The dismal first of January 1969 I was standing in 291 when in walked Anita Pulitzer the young Columbia art student. I had noticed her in the gallery many times before. She was carrying a roll of

drawings. She told me they had been sent to her by a close friend who is now teaching art in the south with the specific request that she showed them to no one. But she said they seem to belong to you. Examining the first drawings charcoals I realized that I had never seen anything like it before. All my gloom and tiredness vanished. Finally a woman on paper. I told Mrs. Pulitzer I might want to show them here and thanked her for bringing them to me. Somebody in the washroom of Columbia asked me if I was from General Keith and I said No I was GA. Well she said someone named her journey although he was having a show. At the Stiglitz gallery Valentine. 291. And I knew right away that that was mine because she had he even said that he was going to show them. And then almost a year. And. I had thought well maybe as I'm going to show not I didn't think too much of both of. Those As soon as

I heard he was having a show with me and said anything to me about it. I went down to make a fuss about it. Then a girl appeared seen in a simple black dress with a little white collar she had sort of a Mona Lisa smile. Who gave you permission to hang these drawings she said. No one I replied still with a smile. She stated very positively you will have to take them down. I think you're mistaken I answered. Well I made the drawings I am Georgia O'Keeffe. I said you have no more right to withhold these pictures than to withdraw a child from the world. Had you given birth to one. We had lunch together. I begged that when she finished her next batch of drawings or paintings she should please pack them up carefully and send them to me express collect I would take care of them. She left. We corresponded.

And. This morning under my door when I came from breakfast there was a letter from Stieglitz. Such a wonderful letters. Sometimes he gets so much of himself into them that I can hardly stand it. Dear Georgia before I left to 91 as darkness. I stood a wind of doing better. It is more marvelous than ever. The new buildings are full of tenants. All the windows were blown off. The planes the wonderful great big sky. Makes you want to breathe so deep that I'll break. Months later at Lake George I received a mailing to with the six cents stamp. And the two were water colors and incredible things. When Arthur dove saw the O'Keefe watercolors he said Stiglitz this girl is doing naturally what many of us fellers are trying to do and failing.

OK first on more than paint she has invented a language. Being in New York again for a few days was great indeed. It was still good so I went to see. Just had to go on eating. There wasn't any way out of it. I'm so glad I went. While I was in New York he photographed me. I was very flattered naturally. For the first time in years I've had time for my own photography. It's intensely direct portraits. It is all eight by 10 work all platinum prints no diffused focus just straight goods. On some things the lens stopped down to one

twenty eight. Photographs. Some impossible for all. Her good. And her face. Their coming career for her. There were no one quarter of the room. But this legwork for sure was like a portrait for her. The person. That he wouldn't. Think of working on I want to. Know something about. His portrait of the young Paul Strand reveals Stieglitz regard and affection for the only photographer chosen for the 291 Stieglitz group. It was Stiglitz who became then the major influence on strands development as a photographer as an artist. And this lens as you're using it makes everything look as though it is made of the same stuff.

Grass looks like water. Water looks as if it has the same quality as the bark of the tree. EROS all the elements that distinguish one form of nature whether stone or whatever it may be from another you have achieved a kind of simplification that looks good for the moment but is full of things which would be detrimental to the final expression of whatever you're trying to do. He advised me to get rid of my soft focus lens Stieglitz gave me the kind of criticism that you could say yes that's so and you could do something about it. This issue of camera work is devoted to Paul Strand. His work is rooted in the best tradition of photography. The work is brutally direct devoid of Flann devoid of all trickery. These photographs are there. Expression of today. I was on the verge of doing the portraits which I did in 1916.

I did all those things with the idea of photographing people without them being aware they were being photographed. The technique used was a false lens screwed to the side of my reflex camera. There are portraits that have an amazing power to them. Also strength and dignity as well. These are photographs that Stiglitz felt particularly powerful statements of what photography can be all about. Bowls and other abstractions with the result of my seeing at 291 the work of costume broken others. I was trying to apply their strange abstract principles to photography. In order to understand that. This Paul Strand number would be the last issue of camerawork the magazine had started one thousand nine hundred two with pictorial photography. The advanced photography of its era. It ended in 1917 with the work of Paul Strand the advanced

photography of its time. Europe has been at war since 1914. Three years later America joined the Allies against Germany and Austria Steichen who love France his home for years enlisted at once in the American Air Corps. The suffering he witnessed during the war would change him for ever. Stieglitz and 291 were devastated by the war. Friends scattered. As a pacifist. And with happy memories of his youth in Germany. He could not join a wartime fever. And the anti-German hysteria. Of. This refusal made him an 291 suspect in the military wartime atmosphere. I have finally decided

that it would be sheer madness to continue to not only watch. My family and I have been badly hit by the effects of the war in prohibition. I am compelled to give up both camera work and 291. I'm supposed to have a huge following and many friends. You'd be amused if you knew the facts. It was the winter of 1970 1980 a winter of coal famine the coldest winter New York experienced in years. I sat in a desolate empty little space. I had nowhere else to go no working place no club no money. I felt somewhat does not Polian must live on his retreat from Moscow. In this dark time it was the growing intimacy of his correspondence with O'Keefe that sustained him. I didn't tell you that this afternoon I said ripping down more shelving in the

little room and ripping down the remaining burlap. The place looks as if it had been ripped by the terrible Germans. Before she left Texas O'Keefe wired Stieglitz. Starting New York tonight my heart has wheels for never asked directly to come to New York while she was still teaching in Texas. He wanted it all to be her impulse. So he told her what would be available to her if she came to New York that she would have a year in which to paint. And that she would have a place to live. That was her own. And that it would be my mother's story or fate already arranged with her. But he didn't try to persuade her out right. He said these are available to you now you decide. O'Keefe came to New York and when then a month Alford was living in the studio with her to having left his wife and their life together had begun.

The lake is our great avenue to ourselves. These last 10 days have been possibly the fullest I have had in my life. Of course the important thing has been O'Keefe she is much more extraordinary than even I had left. In fact I don't believe that there ever has been anything like her mind in feeling very clear spontaneous and uncannily beautiful

absolutely living every postpaid. I am at last photographing again just to satisfy something within me and all who have seen the work say it is a revolution. It is straight no tricks of any kind. It is a series of about 100 pictures of one person heads of the years. Hands. Torsos. It is the doing of something I had in mind for very many years. For a long time he had wanted to make what he came to call a composite portrait of someone a portrait that would record a person's many moods. There are many different cells over their whole lifetime. Between 1917 and one thousand thirty seven when he stopped photographing. He made more than 300 portraits of her.

You have to collaborate or you're being trouble. You have to sit there and you have to. Do what you're told to do. You get so you're helpless. You have a very rickety old. Crime. And Overfield for the modern world. And though the lack of a good looking coffin we have an old umbrella. And that was something very got certain life in the shadows where. When Stiglitz exhibited the O'Keefe portraits for the first time in his 1921 exhibition one hundred forty five prints were shown.

But it was the OPI photographs that caused a sensation. In a part by part revelation of a woman's body in the isolated presentation of a hand a breast and neck a thigh and a leg. Stiglitz achieved the exact visual equivalent of the report of a hand or a face as it travels over the body of the beloved. The exhibition made a stir. It put her at once on the map. Everybody knew the name. She became what is known as a newspaper personality. The U.S. female. Painful mission

climaxes. Thanks to see. Many of the critics seemed almost as if they were thinking. More about Steve puts his portraits of O'Keefe in the nude than they were actually looking at O'Keefe paintings. And O'Keefe herself. Clearly felt. Burned by some of the critical reaction to her paintings. I felt that the critics were over emphasizing the sexual nature of her pictures. One of the most interesting things about Stieglitz is that he seems to have one foot in the 19th century and one foot in the 20th century and that is at the same time that he believed in a rather revolutionary idea and that is that women could be outstanding artists and equal in achievements of the male artists that he supported. He also was very committed to the idea that a woman was expressing a kind of sexual energy in her work

because at the time Freud was just known in America and he had a huge influence on Stiglitz is thinking and interpreted these very innovative abstractions as the sexual expression of Georgia O'Keeffe. And he began to promote her work in that way. So she seems very consciously in the middle of the 1920s to have changed her art not working so much in abstraction which she felt had gotten her into some of the more Freud interpretations but rather to focus on close up studies of fruits and vegetables and of course it was also at this time that she began to do her highly magnified views of flowers which of course only gave the critics more fuel for their Freud and interpretations. My work this year is very much on the ground. There will only be two abstract things. All the rest is objective as objective as I could make it. Thank you.

The decision to get married but OK for an hour for that is still a puzzle. No she didn't but she didn't particularly want to be married neither of them were dead. And it didn't make much sense to me because I've had all the scandal that was much more of a scandal then than it is and the scandal of all today. But at that time it was quite a scandal. Well pardon me I got over being bothered. There wasn't anything I was going to do about it so hard. I always say I have everything said about me that they could say except that I've died. In the summer of 1922 my mother was dying. Our estate was going

to pieces all about me disintegration slow but sure. Dying chestnut trees the poplars doomed to. Die poor but it worked. The world in a great mess. Just at that time one of America's young literary lights Waldo Frank wrote that he believed that the secret power in my photography was due to the power of hypnotism I had over my sitters. I was amazed when I read that statement. I wondered what he had to say about the street scenes and the trees and the interiors. So I made up my mind to answer Mr. Frank. I finally do something I had in mind for years. I make a series of close pictures to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter.

Clouds were there for everyone. Free. But the fact was that it was more than that and it was his sorrow his fear about his mother who was obviously dying and find something which was distant so that he could create some kind of emotional distance for himself. He was speaking with the clouds instead of with a person. Whom. Blind School. What is of greatest importance is to hold a moment. To record something so completely that those who see it will relive an equivalent of what has been expressed. He also began to see that it was a way of exploring abstraction in photography. When I went away he sent me some. Photographs is a color.

Printed on. One of the fundamental suppositions of the mater is a tremendous. Break with the past and one of the things World War 1 represents is that kind of break with the historical culture of Europe. After the war a wide range of American intellectuals searched for a distinctive American style. There were a variety of efforts. Georgia O'Keefe called it The Great American thing she said at one point in the 1920s everybody was chasing after the great American thing the great

American poem The Great American Novel. They even wanted to paint the great American picture and how she said with them jumping off and going to Europe with the great American thing ever going to happen for many years Stiglitz had pioneered a lonely battle for recognition and support of American Art and American artists. Now that everyone had jumped on the American bandwagon. He moved to assert his leadership in 1925 the exhibition seven Americans brought his artists together for the first time. It was a landmark event for modern American art and the dazzling triumph for this statelet circle. These seven Americans are explorers. Their creative self discovery means nothing less than the discovery of America's independent role in the history of art.

The enthusiastic response to the show confirm for Stieglitz that the time had come to open a new space. For Stiglitz the intimate gallery was a new pulpit. It is the American artist by expressing his individual self who give modern expression to the American soul. That notion of a great American thing seems to me a very powerful way to think about what artists modern artists in the 1920s were doing whether they were the Stigwood circle or the Precisionist or a little bit later the regional lists. They all had a similar goal even though they approached it through very different means. Stiglitz was far from pleased when his vision for American Art was challenged by others especially the precision ist's. I like to call them the machine ages. They were fascinated by Manhattan. They were fascinated by the elevated railroad

the bridges that went over the rivers the skyscraper city. Madera De Lay. In New York City. And it may very specifically in the new industrial one high rise structures. In the new technologies that were proliferating at the time. Amongst those artists we include people like Joseph and his Brooklyn Bridge paintings. Or his paintings of Broadway. Charles DeMuth. His. Picture I saw the figure 5 in gold is a magnificent Chrisitian ist view of a rushing fire engine going down a street of Manhattan. Charles Sheeler did a whole series of photographs and paintings based on the Ford Motor plant. They also were interested in what. Might have been known in Stiglitz as circle is sort of

vulgar America. Product America brand name America. A young Stuart Davis paints two brand name products. The machine age is thought of Stieglitz as a little old fashioned in his point of view in his love for spiritual content an emotional and expressive character do art from statelets point of view. The machine ages were indulging in a love affair with base capitalism and materialist America. What he really wanted to do was to raise the level. Spiritual life. In America about what he saw as crass materialism by refining the sensibilities of the American public through the visual arts Stieglitz from the very beginning saw his himself in a kind of missionary sense he became a missionary for a new art new America.

He promoted a movement in which he was at the head of and to an extraordinary degree his own history of himself became the history of modernism. And what we now have to look at a little more critically is his ability to articulate his own view as the view of what the modern in America was about. And it was exclusionary even as it promoted what was going questionably work of considerable merit. He was autocratic. He was highly selective He was not very democratic and he really always maintained the notion that he was fighting for the right cause against a kind of Dolan shallow public that couldn't really understand what he was saying and he had devotees around him who were caught up in his Evan Jellicoe fervor increasingly they began to write about him as a kind of Messiah a prophet a figure who had you know led the people out of the wilderness and into a new religion a religion of culture and

art. And he. He fueled that image of himself. He tended to speak prophetically even to speak in parables perhaps in the mode of an Old Testament prophet. Clearly he was driven by some idea of fame and his manner did have all the marks of grandiosity grandiosity. He felt he was capable of speaking the truth. That's a major conviction. Though he viewed himself as a teacher. He was never able to take pride in his students. When they left him having absorbed his lessons. They had to grow away from him and he never recognized that. He felt always as though he was being betrayed. And this was the great drama because they he had given them everything that he could and then they left him and right and left and they said terrible things about him. He was very possessive

without knowing it. When those people my feel like they had matured somewhat and had come to a position where they assumed that they were more on an equal footing with Stieglitz he had a difficult time often accepting that and so throughout his life he had a number of falling out with people who had been very close friends Steichen and Steve Squyres. And didn't speak for him for many years while Stieglitz remained all of us in the latest Steichen increasingly became a populist. He saw himself as a photographer who could do the work of a standard that could satisfy a Stiglitz but I could reach an enormously broad popular audience. It was the highest paid photographer in the world. But Stiglitz felt that Steichen had sold out. Stiglitz could never forgive Steichen for having done so

now. Stieglitz believed in art for art's sake of course Stieglitz did not have to earn a living and Steichen always had to earn a living. So Stiglitz could afford to believe in art for art's sake these varied aspects of the Stieglitz persona are all components of a very complex character where the dark plays an integral role. Just as it does in his great photographs. But there was a lighter side as well. New York is madder than ever. The pace is ever increasing but George and I somehow don't seem to be of New York nor of anywhere. We live high up in the shop and hotel. The wind howls and shakes the huge steel frame. We feel as if we were out at mid-ocean. One of. Us. When we lived up high in the city photographed out the window. And they were very good

photographs. What did you see out of the what did you see you saw in the city. Martin Lewis and the city building sometimes it would be a building that was going up and it would change from day to day or week to week as you will and sometimes there would be buildings that were nearby and there was a building far off that came in with two of them came into the sky quite often. And when we lived up on the 30th floor. And looked off we'd be up on the level with the tops of the buildings. Our workers confront. But I was very interested in what he did and he was interested in what I did. When Georgia started to paint the skyscraper She even went so far as to write a letter to the critic Waldo Frank and said I want to be east vulgar soul vulgar that people won't like my work anymore. And interestingly when she came to New Mexico she began to

discover the forms of New Mexico. And at that point she stops painting the skyscraper once she finds her New Mexico. It's as if she's found her America. I'm having a wonderful time. You know I never feel at home in the east like I do up here. One Perfect Day after another man to come out. He's having a great time to. The modernists were seeking to create a kind of painting that resonated with American qualities and American seems. So objects that only an American would paint.

MARTIN Hartley was the first to calm Paul Strand came later as with his wife Rebecca Strand and then George came in one thousand twenty nine. Stieglitz heart condition combined with Santa phase high altitude forbade his coming to New Mexico since childhood. His summers were always spent at the family's lake george property. There he found renewal and familiar beloved subjects for his camera. I always thought I wouldn't come back and that was ridiculous I never thought of the not going broke. But you couldn't get him to believe it. He made everybody measurable talking about it I think. He didn't. I wasn't going to stay on here. Because I lived in the city were very much. What you think. I didn't go back. To look towards building right. Now.

But. Stiglitz disciples sought and found a new gallery space for him. The funds for an American place were raised for Stieglitz by Paul Strand. And 25 year old Dorothy Norman. Whose devotion to the new gallery was matched only by her devotion to Stiglitz himself. Norman's complex role is Stieglitz scribe and gallery assistant would result in books and publications that contributed heavily to Stieglitz legend. And for a while her role as muse and model would cause tensions in his marriage to O'Keefe. The gallery opened shortly after the 1929 stock market crash. But in spite of the bleak market for art during the Depression and American placement that Stiglitz could see through the work begun at 291.

That Marian dove and O'Keefe could be free to continue to experiment and develop. The fact that the only two photographers Stieglitz chose to introduce There were the young and soul Adams and Elliot Porter. Testifies to the old man's undimmed eye. For talent. I got no home just the one worker in the hardware. The Great Depression was one of those truly cataclysmic events in American history. No one could be unaffected by this. And there was a great effort to document the Depression by the government. The Farm Security Administration sent out some of the greatest photographers of our time. Extraordinary photographs showing what the conditions were in America.

The whole intellectual world moved left writers an artist wanted their art to have something to say and hopefully even do with the crisis that the society was going through. Stieglitz although a person of the left certainly concerned by all of this couldn't find a way to relate to all of this and I'm not sure what the reason was but one probably has to do with his anarchist spirit his intense individual ism that that was somehow out of place with the collectivist spirit that was emerging in the thirties. Stiglitz is break with Paul Strand was a very political nature with the coming of the Great Depression and who after all had helped to establish an American place turned away when he felt that Stiglitz was using an American place as an ivory tower moved more towards art

as a political tool. An idea that Stiglitz abhorred. Stran felt that Stiglitz had become irrelevant. As the words increasingly comes to seem to younger photographers especially those in it in the documentary mode who came through the FSA as excessively in love with himself excessively egotistical excessively arty may have had something to do with he was perhaps increasing the sense that the artist has really no alternative but to withdraw or Stevens his work changed dramatically in the 1930s. Steve that is where it becomes cooler. In many ways. It becomes sharper and crisper. But many of his pictures from the 1930s have a very almost elegiac quality to them. They're beautiful monumental images.

But there is something almost sad and lonely about many of the photographs. I feel my age not with sadness no fear but rather with a growing sense that I'm inadequate to the responsibilities that I've undertaken. I dare count on no one. I must save my energy so that I can at least follow through what I have begun. Stieglitz laid down his camera in 1937. His late photographs of Lake George among his finest. Are equivalents of his love for this place. Seen of his happiest hours. To the very end of his life he died in 1946. He was still running

galleries. He was still showing his art as he was still making sure that there was criticism written about them. He was making sure they were being sold to the best museums in the country right to the end always seeing that within his soul was a rebel that refused to die. Stephen stood for the freedom of the artist and he did have a fierce kind of the terminations the heroic determination to be free. To be free and to stand in a place where it was possible to speak the truth as you see it in your particular media. And for that you are in the major place in the history of culture in the United States in the world in the 20th century. To. The end.