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Alfred Stieglitz (January 1, 1864 – July 13, 1946)

Stieglitz was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, the first son of German Jewish immigrants. He had five siblings, Flora (1865–1890), twins Julius (1867–1937) and Leopold (1867–1956), Agnes (1869–1952) and Selma (1871–1957). Alfred Stieglitz, seeing the close relationship of the twins, wished he had a soul mate of his own during his childhood.

In 1881, his father, Edward Stieglitz sold his company for US$40,000 and moved his family to Europe for the next several years so that his children would receive a better education. Alfred Stieglitz was enrolled in the Real Gymnasium in Karlsruhe. The next year, he began studying mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin. He enrolled in a chemistry class taught by Hermann Wilhelm Vogel, a scientist and researcher, who worked on the chemical processes for developing photographs. In Vogel, Stieglitz found both the academic challenge he needed and an outlet for his growing artistic and cultural interests. He received an allowance of $1,200 (equivalent to $31,792 in 2019) a month.

In 1884, when his parents returned to America, the 20-year-old Stieglitz remained in Germany, where he knew several artists. He wrote articles on the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography for magazines in England and Germany.

A photo of his won first place in 1887 in a competition in Amateur Photographer. The next year he won both first and second prizes in the same competition, and his reputation began to spread as several German and British photographic magazines published his work.

In 1890, his sister Flora died while giving birth, and Stieglitz returned to New York.

Stieglitz considered himself an artist, but he refused to sell his photographs. His father purchased a small photography business for him so that he could earn a living in his chosen profession. Because he demanded high quality images and paid his employees high wages, the business rarely made a profit. He regularly wrote for The American Amateur Photographer magazine. He won awards for his photographs at exhibitions, including the joint exhibition of the Boston Camera Club, Photographic Society of Philadelphia and the Society of Amateur Photographers of New York.

(Left) Edward Steichen with Kitty

Kitty and Emma

In late 1892, Stieglitz bought his first hand-held camera, a Folmer and Schwing 4×5 plate film camera, which he used to take two of his best known images, Winter, Fifth Avenue (below right) and The Terminal (below left). Prior to that he used an 8×10 plate film camera that required a tripod.

The city as a modern subject
The Terminal

On November 16, 1893, the 29-year-old Stieglitz married 20-year-old Emmeline Obermeyer, the sister of his close friend and business associate Joe Obermeyer and granddaughter of brewer Samuel Liebmann. They were married in New York City. Stieglitz later wrote that he did not love Emmy, as she was commonly known, when they were married and that their marriage was not consummated for at least a year. Stieglitz came to regret his decision to marry Emmy, as she did not share his artistic and cultural interests. Stieglitz biographer Richard Whelan summed up their relationship by saying Stieglitz "resented her bitterly for not becoming his twin." Whelan adds, that throughout his life Stieglitz maintained a fetish for younger women.

In early 1894, Stieglitz and his wife took a delayed honeymoon to France, Italy and Switzerland. Stieglitz photographed extensively on the trip, producing some of his early famous images such as A Venetian Canal (below right), The Net Mender (below left), and A Wet Day on the Boulevard, Paris (bottom).

Stieglitz at the time belonged to the Pictorialist movement, born in England in the 1880s. It proclaimed the artistic character of photography, and can be split into two main trends: the first defended an idea of photography that imitated painting and engraving through manipulation of the pictures or the choice of fantastical or mythological themes; the other promoted a naturalistic vision of photography. Stieglitz identified himself with the latter. He chose to root his subjects in reality, believing that any artistic quality lay in the operator's outlook on the world around him.

Camerawork

In 1900 fellow photographer Clarence H. White thought Stieglitz should meet a young photographer, Edward Steichen and wrote a letter of introduction. Steichen—then en route to Paris from his home in Milwaukee—met Stieglitz in New York City in 1900. In that first meeting, Stieglitz expressed praise for Steichen's background in painting and bought three of Steichen's photographic prints. They quickly became firm friends and over the next two decades their activities were closely inter-related, with Steichen often acting as Stieglitz's agent or representative in Europe.

In 1905, Stieglitz and Steichen created the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which eventually became known as 291 after its address. Steichen made visits to Paris and met many of the artists from around Europe who gathered there. Gallery 291 became a hub and meeting place for a circle of painters and photographers led by Stieglitz. The gallery presented some of the first American exhibitions of Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brâncuși.

Stieglitz had an indomitable belief in the possibility of an American modernism. He gathered about him a group of like-minded talented, young, native artists, among them Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Arthur Dove and Charles Demuth, Max Weber and, later, his wife Georgia O’Keeffe.

‘Stieglitz was promoting a group of artists who were not popular at the time. He needed to be tough’ — Eric Widing, Christie's

Spurred on by competition with Edward Steichen, Stieglitz focussed on the city of New York as the most important subject for the truly modern art of photography.

Old and New New York (1910, left)

Years later when he and O'Keeffe moved into an apartment in a high-rise building both of them produced some really original studies of New York and its tall buildings.

A Snapshot, Paris (1911)

While in Europe, Stieglitz saw the first commercial demonstration of the Autochrome Lumière color photography process, and soon he was experimenting with it in Paris with Steichen, Frank Eugene and Alvin Langdon Coburn. He took three of Steichen's Autochromes with him to Munich in order to have four-color reproductions made for insertion into a future issue of Camera Work.

Autochromes, first licensed by the Lumiere brothers in 1907

While on his way to Europe, Stieglitz took what is recognized not only as his signature image but also as one of the most important photographs of the 20th century. Aiming his camera at the lower class passengers in the bow of the ship, he captured a scene he titled The Steerage. He did not publish or exhibit it for four years.

“You may call this a crowd of immigrants,” he famously said of “The Steerage”, taken in 1907 but not exhibited until 1913. “To me it is a study in mathematical lines, in balance, in a pattern of light and shade.”

1908 O'Keeffe (1887 – 1986) visited galleries, such as 291, co-owned by her future husband, photographer Alfred Stieglitz. The gallery promoted the work of avant-garde artists from the United States and Europe and photographers.

Stieglitz, twenty-four years older than O'Keeffe, provided financial support and arranged for a residence and place for her to paint in New York in 1918. They developed a close personal relationship while he promoted her work. She came to know the many early American modernists who were part of Stieglitz's circle of artists, including painters Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and photographers Paul Strand and Edward Steichen.

In 1914 and 1915 O'Keeffe taught and continued her studies at the Teachers College, Columbia University. In early 1916, O'Keeffe mailed some charcoal drawings to a friend and former classmate who took them to Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz found them to be the "purest, finest, sincerest things that had entered 291 in a long while", and said that he would like to show them. In April that year, Stieglitz exhibited ten of her drawings in his gallery.

O'Keeffe self-portrait (L) and in 3 photos by Stieglitz (R)

At Stieglitz's request, O'Keeffe moved to New York in 1918 and began working seriously as an artist. They developed a professional relationship and a personal relationship that led to their marriage in 1924. O'Keeffe created many forms of abstract art, including close-ups of flowers, such as the Red Canna paintings, that many found to represent female genitalia, although O'Keeffe consistently denied that intention. The imputation of the depiction of women's sexuality was also fueled by explicit and sensuous photographs that Stieglitz had taken and exhibited of O'Keeffe.

O'Keeffe and Stieglitz lived together in New York until 1929, when O'Keeffe began spending part of the year in the Southwest, which served as inspiration for her paintings of New Mexico landscapes and images of animal skulls, such as Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue and Ram's Head White Hollyhock and Little Hills.

Paintings by O'Keeffe

In 1925, Stieglitz was invited by the Anderson Galleries to put together one of the largest exhibitions of American art, entitled Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs, and Things, Recent and Never Before Publicly Shown by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz. Only one small painting by O'Keeffe was sold during the three-week exhibit.

Soon after, Stieglitz was offered the continued use of one of the rooms at the Anderson Galleries, which he used for a series of exhibitions by some of the same artists in the Seven Americans show. In December 1925, he opened his new gallery, "The Intimate Gallery," which he nicknamed "The Room" because of its small size.

In 1927 Stieglitz began to be increasingly infatuated by the 22-year-old Dorothy Norman. Although she was married, with a child, she visited the gallery every day. The relationship with Stieglitz lasted until his death in 1947. She divorced her husband in 1951.

Stieglitz, Norman and (?) Hartley and (R) Dorothy Norman by Stieglitz

O'Keeffe accepted an offer by Mabel Dodge to go to New Mexico for the summer. Stieglitz took advantage of her time away to begin photographing Norman, and he began teaching her the technical aspects of printing as well. Within a short time, they became lovers.

O'Keeffe did not work from late 1932 as she endured various nervous breakdowns and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Even after the physical affair between Stieglitz and Norman diminished after a few years, they continued to work together whenever O'Keeffe was not around until Stieglitz died in 1946.

Norman went on to be a prolific writer and a very committed activist. She wrote the first full biography of Stieglitz.

At the start of her relationship with Stieglitz, O'Keeffe was already involved in very intense correspondence (and more) with the photographer, Paul Strand. As her relationship with Stieglitz developed it eclipsed the relationship she had developed with Strand. Both were, after all, protégés of the great man.

LEFT: Rebecca Salisbury and Paul Strand - RIGHT: Stieglitz and O'Keeffe

Paul Strand (1890 – 1976) first visited Stieglitz's 291 gallery while still at school. He became very close to Stieglitz; one of Stieglitz's most important protégés. In 1922 Strand married Rebecca Salisbury (1891–1968). In her recent book, Foursome, Carolyn Burke has traced the complex, sexually-charged relations that developed between the Rebecca Salisbury, Paul Strand, Stieglitz and O'Keeffe. It shows also the strong bonds forged by ideas and creative inspiration over many years.

At the start of her relationship with Stieglitz, O'Keeffe was already involved in very intense correspondence (and more) with Paul Strand. As her relationship with Stieglitz developed it eclipsed the relationship she had developed with Strand. Both were, after all, protégés of the great man. When Paul Strand introduced his new wife, Rebecca to Stieglitz, he was somewhat put out that Stieglitz got to see his new bride nude before he did. Stieglitz took a number of photos of Rebecca's naked torso as she swam at the Stieglitz country home, Lake George.

Rebecca Strand ("Beck") by Alfred Stieglitz

In 1929 O'Keeffe travelled to New Mexico with Rebecca Strand and stayed in Taos with Mabel Dodge Luhan, who provided the women with studios. For O'Keeffe it was the start of a relationship with the place that was to last the rest of her life.

Rebecca Strand and Georgia O'Keeffe

In early 1929 Stieglitz learned that The Room was going to be demolished. The Strands raised nearly sixteen thousand dollars for a new gallery for Stieglitz, who reacted harshly, saying it was time for "young ones" to do some of the work he had been shouldering for so many years. Although Stieglitz eventually apologized and accepted their generosity, the incident marked the beginning of the end of their long and close relationship.

In the late fall, Stieglitz returned to New York. On December 15, two weeks before his sixty-fifth birthday, he opened "An American Place", the largest gallery he had ever managed. It had the first darkroom he had ever had in the city.

In 1932, Stieglitz mounted a forty-year retrospective of 127 of his works at The Place. He included all of his most famous photographs, but he also purposely chose to include recent photos of O'Keeffe, who, because of her years in the Southwest sun, looked older than her forty-five years, in comparison to Stieglitz's portraits of his young lover Norman. It was one of the few times he acted spitefully to O'Keeffe in public, and it might have been as a result of their increasingly intense arguments in private about his control over her art.

Later that year, he mounted a show of O'Keeffe's works next to some amateurish paintings on glass by Becky Strand. He did not publish a catalog of the show, which the Strands took as an insult. Paul Strand never forgave Stieglitz for that. He said, "The day I walked into the Photo-Secession 291 [sic] in 1907 was a great moment in my life… but the day I walked out of An American Place in 1932 was not less good. It was fresh air and personal liberation from something that had become, for me at least, second-rate, corrupt and meaningless."

Equivalents

Before the outbreak of the First World War Stieglitz had purchased a painting of Kandinsky's, Improvisation No. 27 (1912) even though he could not really afford it. Kandinsky's treatise On the Spiritual in Art (also 1912) made a huge impression on Stieglitz.

Stieglitz was also influenced by the acquaintance he developed with Ananda Coomaraswamy, curator of Asiatic Art at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

In the summer of 1922, Alfred Stieglitz began to take photographs of clouds, tilting his hand camera towards the sky to produce dizzying and abstract images of their ethereal forms. He met the technical challenge by using orthochromatic negatives and yellow-tinted glass. In an article the following year, Stieglitz maintained that these works were a culmination of everything he had learned about photography in the previous forty years:

“Through clouds [I wanted] to put down my philosophy of life—to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter—not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to special privileges, clouds were there for everyone—no tax as yet on them—free.” He believed his "...tiny photographs [were] direct revelations of a man's world in the sky--documents of eternal relationship"

In a letter to the president of The Royal Photographic Society of Britain, he wrote: "It is the beginning of photography as expression and not merely in the pictorial sense.... My photographs are ever born of an inner need -- and Experience of Spirit. I do not make 'pictures.' I have a vision of life and I try to find equivalents for it, sometimes in the form of photographs."

Over the next eight years, he made some 350 cloud studies, largely produced as contact prints on gelatin silver postcard stock.

"...photography as expression..." There are certainly great photographs of clouds that can be made. It does not seem to me that Stieglitz succeeded in making any of them.

After Stieglitz's death, O'Keeffe lived permanently in New Mexico at Georgia O'Keeffe Home and Studio in Abiquiú, until the last years of her life when she lived in Santa Fe.