Background

Edward Steichen was born on March 27, 1879, in Bivange, Luxembourg, the son of Jean Pierre Steichen and Marie Kemp. He was brought to the United States in 1881, and the family settled in Hancock, Michigan, where his father worked as a copper miner and his mother as a milliner.

Education

In 1894, at fifteen, Edward Steichen began attending Pio Nono College, a Catholic boys' high school, where his artistic talents were first noticed; his drawings in particular were said to show promise. He quit high school to begin a four-year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. After hours, Edward Steichen would sketch and draw, and he began to teach himself painting. Having discovered a camera shop near his work, he visited frequently until he persuaded himself to buy his first camera, a secondhand Kodak box "detective" camera, in 1895. Edward Steichen and his friends who were also interested in drawing and photography pooled together their funds, rented a small room in a Milwaukee, WI office building, and began calling themselves the Milwaukee Art Students League.

Career

For more than two decades, Edward Steichen divided his time between the United States and France, successfully pursuing both painting and photography. This dual project at once earned him access to the artists of Paris and made his work central to a new breed of American photographers who wished to have photography recognized as an art. Steichen's photographs from this period - dark, diffuse, out-of-focus, and mysterious - closely resemble some of the painting of the era, and by 1898, Steichen was, as he later put it, "an 'impressionist' without knowing it. "In 1899, Edward Steichen received his first official recognition as a photographer, when his photographs, including "The Lady in the Doorway," were exhibited at the Second Philadelphia Salon.

Edward Steichen headed for Europe in the spring of 1900, stopping in New York City to meet Alfred Stieglitz, who purchased several of his photographs. Two years in Paris earned Edward Steichen a considerable reputation for interpretive portraits, including one of Auguste Rodin, in preparation for which he had met with the sculptor once a week for almost a year. Returning to the United States in 1902, Edward Steichen opened a studio at 291 Fifth Avenue and achieved a degree of celebrity with his portraits of J. P. Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt, and other notables.

At the same time, Edward Steichen joined Stieglitz as a founder of the Photo-Secession (1902), an organization dedicated to photography as an art form, and he led the effort to create "291, " a Photo-Secession exhibition space that opened in 1905 across the hall from his studio. By 1910, when works by Edward Steichen and other Photo-Secession members were hung at the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, the group's primary goal - recognition of photography by that arbiter of taste, the art museum - had been achieved. From France, where he had established a studio at Voulangis in 1906, Steichen supplied "291" with works by Cezanne, Picasso, Braque, and others whose paintings had never been exhibited in the United States. This accomplishment, according to one scholar, set the stage for the 1913 Armory Show.

Most Edward Steichen scholarship has focused on these early years, largely because they appear crucial to the emergence of photography as a fine-art medium. Some scholars have followed Steichen's autobiography, A Life in Photography (1963) in seeing Steichen's early photographs as a rendering of French impressionism, strongly influenced by Monet and Whistler.

The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 initiated a new phase in Steichen's outlook and career. Returning to the United States, Edward Steichen publicly denounced Stieglitz's leadership of "291" as narcissistic, dogmatic, and insular. Volunteering for military duty in 1917 (he had become a naturalized citizen in 1900), he served under General William ("Billy") Mitchell in France, heading the photographic division of the U. S. Army Air Service.

After the war, his distress at his responsibility for the aerial photographs that contributed to the killing and at having seen the "white faces" of the dead, led Edward Steichen to spend three troubled years working out the relationships between his art, the business world, and an inchoate ethic of international humanism. In this period he changed his name from Edouard to Edward (1918); at Voulangis, burned all his paintings and abandoned that discipline entirely; was divorced (1921); and, in photography, turned inward, studying the spiral form in an effort to ground his craft in "nature's laws." Edward Steichen produced a series of compulsively technical, close-up still-life studies of light, scale, volume, and weight (he photographed one cup and saucer more than a thousand times). In addition, he agreed to take promotional photos of consumer items for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency. Although Stieglitz condemned Edward Steichen for pandering to elites and although Walker Evans found his studio portraits superficial, Edward Steichen insisted that art and commerce were not incompatible, and the best of his photographs of the "great, the near-great, and the would-be great" are superb technical achievements ("Charlie Chaplin," 1931) or penetrating character studies ("Greta Garbo," 1928). During these years Edward Steichen also illustrated The First Picture Book: Everyday Things for Babies (1930), a children's book written by his daughter, Mary Steichen Martin; pioneered the photomural while producing a mural of the George Washington Bridge (1932) and another for the New York exhibit at the Chicago World's Fair; and, in 1929, acquired the Umpawaug Breeding Farm in West Redding, Connecticut, where he raised the hybrid delphiniums that he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936.

From 1947 to 1961, Edward Steichen served as Director of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art. While there, he curated and assembled exhibits including The Family of Man, which was seen by nine million people.

Edward Steichen bought a farm that he called Umpawaug in 1928, just outside West Redding, Connecticut. He lived there until his death on March 25, 1973, two days before his 94th birthday.

Achievements

• Edward Steichen was the most frequently featured photographer in Alfred Stieglitz's groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its run from 1903 to 1917. Together Stieglitz and Edward Steichen opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, which became well-known.
  
  His photos of gowns for the magazine Art et Décoration in 1911 are regarded as the first modern fashion photographs ever published. Besides, Edward Steichen was regarded as the best-known and highest-paid photographer in the world.
  
  In 1944, Edward Steichen directed the war documentary The Fighting Lady, which won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The First Picture Book: Everyday Things for Babies

    (The first picture book was originally published in 1930 w...)

    1930
  • Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography

    (This volume traces Steichen’s career trajectory from his ...)

  • Edward Steichen (Photofile)

    (Edward Steichen (1879-1973) had the rare ability to turn ...)

    2008
  • Steichen At War

    (Air and naval operations and the activities of men aboard...)

    1987
  • Steichen: The Master Prints 1895-1914 1978
  • The family of man: The greatest photographic exhibition of all time 1955
  • Steichen: A Life in Photography 1963
  • Edward Steichen: In High Fashion - The Conde Nast Years, 1923-1937

• photography

  • Paul Robeson as "Emperor Jones"

    1934

  • Sunday Night, 40th Street, New York

    1925

  • Greta Garbo. Hollywood

    1928

  • Mrs. Wetman

    1933

  • Exhibition poster for Edward J. Steichen, Helios, New York

    1976

  • Nude with cat

    1903

  • The Maypole (Empire State Building). New York

    1932

  • Shoes

    1930

  • Gary Cooper. Hollywood

    1930

  • Marlene Dietrich. Hollywood

    1931

Personality

Edward Steichen became a U.S. citizen in 1900 and signed the naturalization papers as Edward J. Steichen; however, he continued to use his birth name of Éduard until after the First World War.

Connections

Edward Steichen married Clara Smith in 1903. They had two daughters, Mary and Kate. In 1914, Clara accused her husband of having an affair with artist Marion H. Beckett, who was staying with them in France. The Steichens left France just ahead of invading German troops. In 1915, Clara Steichen returned to France with her daughter Kate, staying in their house in the Marne in spite of the war. Edward Steichen returned to France with the Photography Division of the American Army Signal Corps in 1917, whereupon Clara returned to the United States. In 1919, Clara Steichen sued Marion Beckett for having an affair with her husband but was unable to prove her claims. Clara and Edward Steichen eventually divorced in 1922. Steichen married Dana Desboro Glover in 1923. She died of leukemia in 1957. In 1960, aged 80, Edward Steichen married 27-year-old Joanna Taub and remained married to her until his death, two days before his 94th birthday.

Father:

Jean-Pierre Steichen

Mother:

Marie Kemp Steichen

Spouse:

Joanna Taub

(m. 1960)

Spouse:

Dana Desboro Glover

(m. 1923; died 1957)

Spouse:

Clara E. Smith

(m. 1903; div. 1922)

Friend:

Charles Caffin

Sister:

Lilian Steichen

Lilian Steichen was born in Hancock, MI. She later married poet Carl Sandburg.

Daughter:

Mary Calderone

Mary Steichen Calderone (July 1, 1904 - October 24, 1998) was an American physician and a public health advocate for sexual education. Her most notable feat was overturning the American Medical Association policy against the dissemination of birth control information to patients.

Daughter:

Kate

colleague:

John Szarkowski

Partner:

Alfred Stieglitz

References

• Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography
  2002
• Camera Work: Stieglitz, Steichen and their Contemporaries (Photofile)
  1991
• Biography of Master Photographer: Edward Steichen Chinese Edition
  2015
• Steichen: A Biography
  1997
• An educational website about Edward Steichen An educational website has been created to help the public locate general information related to one of the great 20th century American photographers, as well as direct researchers and independent scholars to written information and visual images and materials located at museums and research institutions in the United States and abroad.
• Faces of War: The Untold Story of Edward Steichen's WWII Photographers A visually stunning collection that brings the soldiers' experience to vivid photographic life. The Aviation Photographic Unit was a military unit unlike any other in World War II. Founded and led by legendary photographer Edward Steichen, the photographers in this unit gave Americans on the home front memorable and dramatic images of the people fighting the Navy's battles in the Pacific theater.
• The Bitter Years: Edward Steichen and the Farm Security Administration Photographs The Bitter Years was the title of a seminal exhibition held in 1962 at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, curated by Edward Steichen, and 2012 marks its fiftieth anniversary. The show featured 209 images by photographers who worked under the aegis of the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1935-1941, as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The Bitter Years celebrates some of the most iconic photographs of the twentieth century, and - since no proper catalog was produced at the time - provides a whole new insight into Steichen’s impact on the history of documentary photography.
  2012
• Steichen's Legacy This is the first gathering in thirty years of Steichen's photographs, spanning seven decades: the landscapes, the haunting studies of flowers, the portraits of friends and family, the still lifes and cityscapes.
• Edward Steichen: In High Fashion - The Conde Nast Years, 1923-1937 The most extensive collection of Steichen's legendary Vogue and Vanity Fair work ever brought to the public.
  2008
• Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography
  2000