Modern Art in America Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries

"Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries"

National Gallery of Art

In the first half of the twentieth century, Alfred Stieglitz did more to introduce modern art to an American public than—arguably—whatever other single private. Fifty-fifty for all of his fame as a photographer, he will probably exist all-time remembered as an art dealer, a profession whose commercial activities he disdained. In an era when ego and greed accept earned many gallerists the kind of reputation unremarkably reserved for used-car salesmen, it is remarkable that a major American museum—the National Gallery of Fine art in Washington, DC, no less—would organize an exhibition that acknowledges the contribution made to the history of modern art by its premiere American dealer.

"Modern Fine art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries" was organized by Sarah Greenough, curator of photographs at the National Gallery and an best-selling expert on Stieglitz. The National Gallery was the ideal place to host such an exhibition, for in 1949, Georgia O'Keeffe, who served equally executor of Stieglitz'due south estate, gave the establishment 1,550 of his prints, a collection and so complete that it has become known as the "primary set." Greenough not only served every bit curator of the exhibition, but also edited the show's massive catalogue, which contains essays by a host of notable scholars.

In 1902, Stieghtz founded the Photo-Secession, a group defended to the promotion of photography as a fine art. Three years later, on the proposition of young man photographer Edward Steichen, he opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in a small room on the top floor of an sometime brownstone at 291 5th Artery (betwixt Thirtieth and Thirty-first Streets). The main purpose of the gallery was to showcase photography, simply from the very beginning, it was open up to the possibility of including "other fine art productions." A twelvemonth afterwards, Stieglitz began showing paintings and drawings with the intention of demonstrating, as he explained in the pages of Camera Work (a magazine he edited and had published since 1902), that "the Secessionist Idea is neither the servant nor the product of a medium." For 10 years, from 1907 through 1917, the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession—ameliorate known as 291 (from its street address)—staged some of the most important early on exhibitions of modern art held in America, featuring artists similar Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi, and other European modernists; in nigh cases, these were the first showings of their work in New York.

Stieglitz was a homo with an agenda. He wanted photography to be accepted every bit a fine art, but he likewise knew that American fine art could only benefit from being placed in the context of vanguard European art. Reverse to popular conventionalities (then and now), Stieglitz's motives were not purely donating. If he managed to get photography accustomed as art, he would be one of the fist photographers to achieve this new, elevated status. As Greenough and her colleagues point out in the National Gallery catalogue, Stieghtz staged a series of three exhibitions at his gallery—before, during, and but after the Armory Testify in 1913—that were designed to forcefulness a comparing not only between American and European art, just between modernistic fine art and photography. The first was a evidence of Marin watercolors, the second a selection of his own photographs (held at the same fourth dimension equally the Arsenal Show, and thereby placing his work at the center of what he himself described as "a diabolical test"), and the third a series of gouaches and watercolors by Francis Picabia, the only major European modernist to be in New York during the fourth dimension of the Arsenal Show.

It would be logical to presume that the Armory Evidence's neat success might accept pleased Stieglitz, for many of the artists who were included—not merely the Europeans, but the Americans every bit well—showed for the first fourth dimension at 291. Just Stieglitz wanted his gallery to remain an experiment, a laboratory of radical ideas that would proceed to generate lively argue, with Stieglitz serving as its ever-nowadays moderator and guiding light. Moreover, with success came money—if not actual cash, then at least the implication that substantial amounts of money changed hands when a work of art sold, an impression that Stieglitz did everything in his power to refute. Indeed, throughout his career as a dealer, Stieglitz used his own personal income to subsidize the rent and operating expenses of his diverse galleries, although he was willing to accept outside support (as when Paul Haviland, a paring of the gallery whose father endemic a successful porcelain company in France, volunteered to pay the gallery'due south hire in 1908). Whenever anything sold, Stieglitz retained a 15 pct commission "for the do good of the Photo-Secession treasury," an amount he raised to 20 percent in 1909. These earnings not only contributed to the gallery'due south overhead, but were used to establish a fund to back up the artists whose work Stieglitz represented. He believed that in social club for artists to be truly free to create, they should never exist concerned with the coin their work might or might not exist worth (any thoughts of that kind he equated with prostitution).

Equally a result of his confidence that art should non be treated as a commercial commodity, Stieglitz'south dealings with clients of the gallery could be highly irregular. He insisted, for example, that pictures needed to "find homes instead of owners." Stieglitz preferred to envision the gallery more than every bit a not-for-profit cooperative than every bit a potential source of income for himself or his artists. "What Stieglitz resented more than anything else," recalled Maria Rapp, secretary at 291 for several years, "was to have someone who had money come in and offer to buy a painting as if it were a shop or equally if the work were some commodity. If he thought they wanted to buy just because they had coin, he might double the price of the painting. If someone else came in and was simply crazy about something, and had zero else in mind, he would let them have it for half-price!"

Eventually, a number of 291'southward insiders decided that the gallery needed a more commercial outlet. In 1915, with the assistance and encouragement of Haviland and Picabia, equally well every bit financial baclung from Agnes Ernst (who was married to the wealthy New York banker, Eugene Meyer Jr.), Marius de Zayas opened the Modern Gallery at 500 5th Artery (at Forty-2nd Street, nigh ten blocks n of 291). De Zayas was a Mexican caricature artist who had worked closely with Stieglitz for years, even helping to organize several exhibitions for 291. However, he felt that with Stieglitz'southward quixotic business practices, it was time to open a new gallery, "to exercise business not only to fight against quack commercialism but in order to support ourselves and make others be able to back up themselves." Although Stieglitz initially endorsed the new enterprise, he eventually came to run into it as a factor that contributed to the demise of 291. "I realize more & more [how] . . . really unique that little front room was for years," he wrote to Marie Rapp just after 291 closed in 1917, "until its 'friends' ruined it for all."

The revolt Stieglitz detected might not have been as personal every bit he envisioned, for de Zayas and his associates had already come to accept an aesthetic shift that Stieglitz was either incapable of grasping or chose to pass up. In 1915, de Zayas and Picabia had embraced the car and machinist engineering science, both having produced portraits of Stieglitz that propose, at best, that he was wearied in his efforts to promote modernistic art, or at worst, finished (Picabia rendered him every bit a broken camera, next to which appears a automobile gearshift tellingly positioned in neutral). In 1917, the single greatest threat to the formalist aesthetics of the twenty-four hours came in the grade of the glistening white porcelain urinal that, under the pseudonym of R. Mutt, Marcel Duchamp submitted to an exhibition as a work of fine art. When Stieglitz agreed to record the piece of work for posterity with his photographic camera, he unwittingly served every bit an cohort to Duchamp's ingenious plan. In having taken great pains to compose the epitome carefully, positioning it against a painting past Marsden Hartley whose internal forms reflected its curving profile, Stieglitz played the formalist game that Duchamp'south readymades reject. Moreover, in allowing his photograph to be reproduced in a Dada journal, Stieglitz automatically lent his name and position of dominance to assist establish the credentials of this commonplace bathroom fixture as a bona fide piece of work of art. In the National Gallery exhibition, the urinal and the Hartley painting, Stieglitz's photo of them, and the de Zayas and Picabia portraits referred to in this paragraph, nosotros're all placed in a side gallery. Whether intended or not, this spatial division served to split up this event from the course of action Stieglitz had planned for himself and the artists whose work he would keep to represent in his galleries.

In the years afterwards 291 closed, Stieglitz spent much of his time nurturing a love affair with Georgia O'Keeffe, taking nearly 200 photographs of her (clothed and unclothed), work that represents, to many, the all-time of his career. In this menstruation he was without a gallery of his own, still he continued to organize shows for various commercial establishments in New York of the artists whose piece of work he believed in (especially Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove), culminating in a serial of exhibitions that displayed his photographs together with O'Keeffe's paintings. In 1925, he organized an exhibition for the Anderson Galleries, the elaborate title of which identified the artists he would back up for the rest of his career as an fine art dealer (a title, it is worth noting, that begins and ends with his proper name, emphasizing his dual role as organizer and participant): "Alfred Stieglitz Presents 7 Americans: 159 Paintings, Photographs, and Things, Contempo and Never Before Publicly Shown by Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, Paul Strand, Georgia O'Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz."

With the aim of establishing the essential characteristics and identity of an indigenous American art, Stieglitz would continue to evidence the work of these seven artists in monographic exhibitions in his galleries, showtime at the Intimate Gallery (1925–29) then at An American Place (1929–46). Fifty-fifty though he had introduced avant-garde European fine art to the American public at 291, he did not do so with the intention of influencing his artists; indeed, whenever he detected an obvious foreign influence in a work of art, he considered information technology derivative, and thus incapable of displaying any uniquely American sensitivities (which is probably why he stopped showing the paintings of Max Weber, and why he never elected to prove Human Ray, even though the artist was an early associate of the gallery). In a 1923 letter to the author Paul Rosenfeld, for example, Stieglitz confessed that although he was amidst the first to bear witness modern French art in America, he always fought for an "America without that damned French flavor!"

Although Stieglitz held a relatively minor exhibition of Picabia's work at the Intimate Gallery in 1928 (probably in deference to his before friendship with the artist), and he presented watercolors past George Grosz in 1935, he never showed any other examples of advanced European fine art in his galleries once more. Information technology had served its purpose. Indeed, by 1930, Stieglitz had grown to resent the attention that was however beingness paid to European art, particularly by Americans. In a revealing letter of the alphabet written to Demuth in that year, he openly questioned why none of his artists had "go rich similar the French artists so lovingly supported by art-loving America!" Rhetorically, he then asks: "Why aren't y'all and Marin and O'Keeffe and Pigeon Frenchmen? And I at least a Human being Ray in Paris?"

Francis Thousand. Naumann is an contained scholar, curator, and art dealer.

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/200105/alfred-stieglitz-and-his-new-york-galleries-736

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