This show had the air of a family celebration about it. Timed to coincide with the publication of a new biography of Alfred Stieglitz by Sue Davidson Lowe, his grandniece, the exhibition was co-curated by Ellen Lowe—Sue Lowe’s daughter, and thus the great-grandniece of the photographer and entrepreneur extraordinaire of Modernism in America. Moreover, the elder Lowe, as a young girl, appears in many of the photographs by Stieglitz that made up half the show.
For those in them and those who make them, family snapshots are artifacts of emotional moments—mementos of specific personal relationships, and thus not fully pictorial. Because of this they need not be especially well crafted or visually interesting. But Stieglitz’s family photographs combine the emotional, artifactual quality of snapshots with the consciously controlled effects of an accomplished photographer. The pictures here fell into two groups. The first, from the years around the turn of the century, were made in the pictorialist style Stieglitz pursued in his early work. The second included pictures made in the 1920s, after he had begun his radically simplified “Equivalents,” pushing his own work through the sort of Modernist transformation that he had begun to champion nearly two decades before on the walls of his 291 gallery and in the pages of Camera Work. The juxtaposition of the two groups demonstrated how far Stieglitz traveled in developing the plain style to which he was led by the emerging Modernism, with its emphasis (which he adopted with characteristic passion) on the unique, inherent properties of a medium. But the two groups also reflect the shift in Stieglitz’s role within his family—from the not-so-dutiful artistic son of a haut bourgeois family, to the revered granduncle of the young Davidson sisters who appear frequently in the unpretentious but sharply observed later pictures.
Complementing this family-album selection was a range of work by nearly all of the painters and photographers shown at An American Place, Stieglitz’s third and final gallery, which he ran from 1929 until his death in 1946. Particularly well represented, with half a dozen or so works each, were the core group of artists whom Stieglitz had promoted since his 291 days: Charles Demuth, Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe. This diverse compendium gave a cross section of Stieglitz’s later concerns, when he advocated a distinctly American kind of Modernism based on a close observation of common subjects and the subtle rendering of light and atmospheric conditions. This program had an especially strong influence on the work of photographers like Paul Strand, Ansel Adams, and Eliot Porter (all included here); many of the painters in the show used abstraction to heighten the emotional information of the painting, while not losing the specificity of the scene depicted.
Several paintings here had not been seen publicly since being shown by Stieglitz. Two early O’Keeffe works suggest how common were certain approaches to space, light, and color among the artists around Stieglitz. In her Lake George, Autumn, 1924, a typical Marin motif is presented in his same constrained space. But in O’Keeffe’s hands the colors of the pastoral scene become tinged with eroticism, the tree-covered hillside a throbbing purplish maroon. (A similar erotic hum underlies Hartley’s work here, with its palette of flesh colors—pinks, browns, and reds.) In East River, 1927, another O’Keeffe work not seen publicly since its first showing, the space is equally compressed, here by the high angle from which the long horizontal of the river—flanked by the jagged, near-silhouetted buildings on either shore, and reflecting winter sunlight—is seen. Also included were several works done in O’Keeffe’s crystalline later style, with the eroticism hinted at earlier now boldly asserted, and with soft Eastern light replaced by the blitz of the Western sun.
Stieglitz is the subject of welcome attention this winter, with the lavish monograph by Sarah Greenough and Juan Hamilton just released, and the retrospective of his work at Washington’s National Gallery. This modest show provided a valuable counterpoint to those more elaborate undertakings, examining little-known aspects of both his life and his work.
—Charles Hagen
