Group of artists in 1912, L to R : Paul Haviland, Abraham Walkowitz, Katharine Rhoades, Stieglitz's first wife Emily, Agnes Meyer, Alfred Stieglitz, John Barrett Kerfoot, John Marin
Connections
Friend: Alfred Hinton
1904
Hinton, photographed by Percy G. R. Wright
Daughter: Katherine
1910
Katherine Stieglitz
Spouse: Emmeline Obermeyer
Autochrome portrait of Stieglitz and his wife Emily, ca. 1915. While attributed to Stieglitz, the image may well be the work of Edward Steichen or Frank Eugene.
Alfred Stieglitz was an American photographer and modern art promoter who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an accepted art form. In addition to his photography, Alfred Stieglitz was known for the New York art galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century, where he introduced many avant-garde European artists to the U.S.
Background
Alfred Stieglitz was born on January 1, 1864, in Hoboken, New Jersey, United States. He was the first son of German-Jewish immigrants Edward Stieglitz (1833-1909) and Hedwig Ann Werner (1845-1922). His father was a lieutenant in the Union Army. 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.
Education
Alfred Stieglitz attended Charlier Institute, a Christian school, and the best private school in New York, in 1871. The following year, his family began spending the summers at Lake George in the Adirondack Mountains, a tradition that continued into Stieglitz's adulthood.
So that he would qualify for admission to the City College of New York, Alfred Stieglitz was enrolled in a public school for his senior year of high school but found the education inadequate.
In 1881, Edward Stieglitz sold his company for US$400,000 and moved his family to Europe for the next several years so that his children would receive a better education. Alfred Stieglitz enrolled in the Realgymnasium in Karlsruhe. The next year, Alfred Stieglitz studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin (now the Technical University of 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, Alfred 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.
Career
German artists Adolf von Menzel and Wilhelm Hasemann were his friends. Alfred Stieglitz bought his first camera and traveled through the European countryside, taking photographs of landscapes and peasants in Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands. Photography, he later wrote, "fascinated me, first as a toy, then as a passion, then as an obsession."
In 1884, his parents returned to America, but 20-year-old Alfred Stieglitz remained in Germany and collected books on photography and photographers in Europe and the U.S. Through his self-study, he saw photography as an art form. In 1887, he wrote his very first article, "A Word or Two about Amateur Photography in Germany", for the new magazine The Amateur Photographer. He then wrote articles on the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography for magazines in England and Germany.
Alfred Stieglitz won first place for his photography, The Last Joke, Bellagio, in 1887 from 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 Alfred Stieglitz returned to New York.
Alfred 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 Alfred Stieglitz demanded high-quality images and paid his employee high wages, the Photochrome Engraving Company 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.
In late 1892, Alfred 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 and The Terminal. Prior to that, he used an 8×10 plate film camera that required a tripod.
Alfred Stieglitz gained a reputation for his photography and his magazine articles about how photography is a form of art. In the spring of 1893, he became co-editor of The American Amateur Photographer. In order to avoid the appearance of bias in his opinions and because Photochrome was now printing the photogravures for the magazine, Alfred Stieglitz refused to draw a salary. He wrote most of the articles and reviews in the magazine and was known for both his technical and his critical content.
In early 1894, Alfred Stieglitz and his first wife took a delayed honeymoon to France, Italy, and Switzerland. He photographed extensively on the trip, producing some of his early famous images such as A Venetian Canal, The Net Mender, and A Wet Day on the Boulevard, Paris. While in Paris, he met French photographer Robert Demachy, who became a lifelong correspondent and colleague. In London, Alfred Stieglitz met The Linked Ring founders George Davison and Alfred Horsley Hinton, both of whom remained his friends and colleagues throughout much of his life.
Later in the year, after his return, Alfred Stieglitz was unanimously elected as one of the first two American members of The Linked Ring. He saw this recognition as the impetus he needed to step up his cause of promoting artistic photography in the United States. At the time there were two photographic clubs in New York, the Society of Amateur Photographers and the New York Camera Club. He resigned from his position at the Photochrome Company and as editor of American Amateur Photographer and spent most of 1895 negotiating a merger of the two clubs. In May 1896, the two organizations joined to form The Camera Club of New York. Although offered the organization's presidency, he became vice-president. He developed programs for the club and was involved in all aspects of the organization.
Alfred Stieglitz turned the Camera Club's current newsletter into a magazine, Camera Notes, and was given full control over the new publication. Its first issue was published in July 1897. It was soon considered the finest photographic magazine in the world. Over the next four years, he used Camera Notes to champion his belief in photography as an art form by including articles on art and aesthetics next to prints by some of the leading American and European photographers.
Alfred Stieglitz also continued to take his own photographs. Late in 1897, he hand-pulled the photogravures for the first portfolio of his own work, Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies. He continued to exhibit in shows in Europe and the U.S., and by 1898 his gained a solid reputation as a photographer. He was paid $75 (equivalent to $2,305 in 2019) for his favorite print, Winter - Fifth Avenue. Ten of Stieglitz's prints were selected that year for the first Philadelphia Photographic Salon, where he met and then became friends of Gertrude Käsebier and Clarence H. White.
In November 1898, a group of photographers in Munich, Germany, mounted an exhibit of their work in conjunction with a show of graphic prints from artists that included Edvard Munch and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. They called themselves the "Secessionists", a term that Alfred Stieglitz latched onto for both its artistic and its social meanings. Four years later, he used this same name for a newly formed group of pictorial photographers that he organized in New York.
In May 1899, Alfred Stieglitz was given a one-man exhibition, consisting of eighty-seven prints, at the Camera Club. The strain of preparing for this show, coupled with the continuing efforts to produce Camera Notes, took a toll on Stieglitz's health. To lessen his burden he brought in his friends Joseph Keiley and Dallet Fugeut, neither of whom were members of the Camera Club, as associate editors of Camera Notes. Upset by this intrusion from outsiders, not to mention their own diminishing presence in the Club's publication, many of the older members of the Club began to actively campaign against Stieglitz's editorial authority. Alfred Stieglitz spent most of 1900 finding ways to outmaneuver these efforts, embroiling him in protracted administrative battles.
Due to the continued strain of managing the Camera Club, by the following year, Alfred Stieglitz collapsed in the first of several mental breakdowns. He spent much of the summer at the family's Lake George home, Oaklawn, recuperating. When he returned to New York, he announced his resignation as editor of Camera Notes.
Photographer Eva Watson-Schütze urged him to establish an exhibition that would be judged solely by photographers who, unlike painters and other artists, knew about photography and its technical characteristics. In December 1901, Alfred Stieglitz was invited by Charles DeKay of the National Arts Club to put together an exhibition in which Stieglitz would have "full power to follow his own inclinations." Within two months Alfred Stieglitz had assembled a collection of prints from a close circle of his friends, which, in homage to the Munich photographers, he called the Photo-Secession.
Stieglitz was not only declaring secession from the general artistic restrictions of the era but specifically from the official oversight of the Camera Club. The show opened at the Arts Club in early March 1902, and it was an immediate success.
Alfred Stieglitz began formulating a plan to publish a completely independent magazine of pictorial photography to carry forth the artistic standards of the Photo-Secessionist. By July, he had fully resigned as editor of Camera Notes, and one month later he published a prospectus for a new journal he called Camera Work. He was determined it would be "the best and most sumptuous of photographic publications". The first issue was printed four months later, in December 1902, and like all of the subsequent issues, it contained beautiful hand-pulled photogravures, critical writings on photography, aesthetics, and art, and reviews and commentaries on photographers and exhibitions. Camera Work was "the first photographic journal to be visual in focus."
Throughout 1903, Alfred Stieglitz published Camera Work and worked to exhibit his own work and that of the Photo-Secessionists while dealing with the stresses of his home life. By 1904, he was again mentally and physically exhausted and decided to take his family to Europe in May. He planned a grueling schedule of exhibitions, meetings, and excursions and collapsed almost upon arrival in Berlin, where he spent more than a month recuperating. He spent much of the rest of 1904 photographing Germany while his family visited their relations there. On his way back to the U. S. Alfred Stieglitz stopped in London and met with leaders of the Linked Ring but was unable to convince them to set up a chapter of their organization in America (with Stieglitz as the director).
On November 25, 1905, the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession" opened on Fifth Avenue with one hundred prints by thirty-nine photographers. Edward Steichen had recommended and encouraged Alfred Stieglitz, on his return from Europe, to lease out three rooms across from Steichen's apartment that the pair felt would be perfect to exhibit photography. The gallery became an instant success, with almost fifteen thousand visitors during its first season and, more importantly, print sales that totaled nearly $2,800. Work by his friend Steichen, who had an apartment in the same building, accounted for more than half of those sales.
Alfred Stieglitz continued to focus his efforts on photography, at the expense of his family. Emmy, who hoped she would one day earn Stieglitz's love, continued giving him an allowance from her inheritance.
Two months later the 42-year-old Stieglitz met 28-year-old artist Pamela Colman Smith, who wished to have her drawings and watercolors shown at his gallery. He decided to show her work because he thought it would be "highly instructive to compare drawings and photographs in order to judge photography's possibilities and limitations". Her show opened in January 1907, with far more visitors to the gallery than any of the previous photography shows, and soon all of her exhibited works were sold. Alfred Stieglitz, hoping to capitalize on the popularity of the show, took photographs of her art work and issued a separate portfolio of his platinum prints of her work.
As a result of his varied activities, Stieglitz’s reputation in the art world grew quickly, and in 1910 the Albright Gallery (now the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) of Buffalo, New York, a highly respected institution, offered him its entire gallery space to do an exhibition on the art of photography as he understood it. After the Buffalo exhibition, Alfred Stieglitz made few photographs for five years. When he returned to creating his own photographs in 1915, his work seems to have become washed clean of the old artistic postures and darkroom manipulations and dedicated instead to the clear observation of fact. The change was perhaps due in part to his recognition that - for the most part - the work in the Buffalo exhibition represented a dead end and would lead only to progressively weaker repetition. In addition, it is impossible to believe that a person of Stieglitz’s artistic intelligence would not be changed by exposure to the work of Rodin, Matisse, Brancusi, Picasso, and Braque, which he had shown at 291 between 1908 and 1914. But perhaps the most direct cause of Stieglitz’s artistic renewal was seeing the first mature work of Paul Strand, which Alfred Stieglitz featured in 1917 in the final (double) issue of Camera Work. Alfred Stieglitz had always been quick to learn from his protégés, and he was unquestionably challenged by Strand’s work, which he characterized as "brutally direct, pure and devoid of trickery."
Stieglitz’s new views were incompatible with those of most amateur photographers, the core of Camera Work’s pool of subscribers, who tended to regard photography as a means not of exploring the world but of hiding from it. When Camera Work began it had about 650 paying subscribers; by the time it stopped being published in 1917 it had about 36. Many of its original subscribers were doubtless disaffected by the magazine’s apparent abandonment of Pictorialist photography in favor of avant-garde painting. With the outbreak of World War I, others were repelled by Stieglitz’s pro-German sentiments. In a larger sense, Camera Work may have died because Stieglitz had lost interest in the aims - promoting photography as a fine art along the lines of painting - that it was founded to advance.
Free at last of the duties of the publisher, editor, and gallery proprietor, Alfred Stieglitz began, in his early 50s, the most original and productive period of his life as an artist. During the following 20 years, he produced the work that defines his stature as a modern artist. In 1917 he met the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, who would quickly become his lover and finally (in 1924) his wife after Alfred Stieglitz gained a divorce from his first wife, the former Emmeline Obermeyer. His serial portrait of O’Keeffe, made over a period of 20 years, contains more than 300 individual pictures and remains unique and compelling in its ability to capture many facets of a single subject. Until he stopped photographing in 1937, Alfred Stieglitz also created series depicting the changing skyline of New York, cloud formations ("equivalents"), and the surroundings of his summer home at Lake George, New York. These later works remain remarkably vital and continue to inspire and challenge photographers and artists in other fields.
Alfred Stieglitz also continued his efforts to support and exhibit Modernist art. After closing 291, he opened two additional galleries: the Intimate Gallery, from 1925 to 1929, and An American Place, from 1929 until his death in 1946. These small galleries were dedicated almost exclusively to the exhibition of the American Modernist artists.
Achievements
Alfred Stieglitz produced more than 2,500 mounted photographs over his career. After his death, O'Keeffe assembled a set of what she considered the best of the photographs that he had personally mounted. In some cases, she included slightly different versions of the same image, and these series are invaluable for their insights about Stieglitz's aesthetic composition. In 1949, she donated the first part of what she called the "key set" of 1,317 Stieglitz photographs to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In 1980, she added to the set another 325 photographs taken by Stieglitz of her, including many nudes. Now numbering 1,642 photographs, it is the largest, most complete collection of Stieglitz's work anywhere in the world. In 2002 the National Gallery published a two-volume, 1,012-page catalog that reproduced the complete key set along with detailed annotations about each photograph.
Quotations:
"Photography is a fad well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze."
"I have always been a great believer in today. Most people live either in the past or in the future so that they really never live at all. So many people are busy worrying about the future of art or society, they have no time to preserve what is. Utopia is at the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere."
"Nearly right is child's play."
"Photography is not art. Neither is painting, nor sculpture, literature, or music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings… You do not have to be a painter or a sculptor to be an artist. You may be a shoemaker. You may be creative as such. And, if so, you are a greater artist than the majority of the painters whose work is shown in the art galleries of today."
Membership
L’Effort
,
Belgium
Photographic Club
,
Austria
Photographic Society Hamburg
,
Germany
American Photographic Society
,
United States
Chicago Society
,
United States
Philadelphia Photographic Society
,
United States
Connections
On November 16, 1893, the 29-year-old Alfred 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. Alfred 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. Daughter of a wealthy brewery owner, she had inherited money from her father. Alfred Stieglitz came to regret his decision to marry Emmy, as she did not share his artistic and cultural interests.
On September 27, 1898, Stieglitz's daughter, Katherine "Kitty", was born. Using Emmy's inheritance, the couple hired a governess, cook, and a chambermaid. Alfred Stieglitz worked at the same pace as before the birth of his daughter, and as a result, the couple predominantly lived separate lives under the same roof.
Camera Work: The Complete Image Collection
Many of the early twentieth century's finest examples of photography and modernist art reached their widest audience in the fifty issues of Camera Work, edited and published by the legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. The lavishly illustrated periodical established photography as fine art and brought a new sensibility to the American art world. This volume reproduces chronologically all the photographs and other illustrations.
Foursome: Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, Rebecca Salsbury
A captivating, spirited account of the intense relationship among four artists whose strong personalities and aesthetic ideals drew them together, pulled them apart, and profoundly influenced the very shape of twentieth-century art. New York, 1921: acclaimed photographer Alfred Stieglitz celebrates the success of his latest exhibition—the centerpiece, a series of nude portraits of his soon-to-be wife, the young Georgia O'Keeffe. The exhibit acts A captivating, spirited account of the intense relationship among four artists whose strong personalities and aesthetic ideals drew them together, pulled them apart, and profoundly influenced the very shape of twentieth-century art.
Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography
A comprehensive biography of Alfred Stieglitz, a pioneering photographer, influential tastemaker, and husband of Georgia O'Keeffe, offers an intimate look at his brilliant circle of artists and intellectuals, his innovative work, and his tumultuous personal life.