Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  —Arthur W. Dow

  CHAPTER 1

  Born in Hoboken

  1864–1905

  “I was born in Hoboken. I am an American,” Stieglitz declared in his Anderson Galleries catalog. In 1921, at a time of renewed patriotism, his German-Jewish origins made him seem doubly foreign. To those who questioned his right to speak for the country, he objected that he was as American as they were.

  * * *

  . . .

  Hoboken, New Jersey, was then a middle-class town, which owed its prosperity to the steamship companies lining its docks. Edward Stieglitz had brought Hedwig Werner, his bride, to reside there in 1862, when so many of their compatriots lived in Hoboken that it was called “Little Germany.” Edward purchased a three-story house with a view of Manhattan soon after Hedwig gave birth to Alfred, their first child, on January 1, 1864.

  Born Ephraim Stieglitz in Münden, Germany, Alfred’s father changed his name to Edward when he came to the United States after the 1848 revolution. Within a short time, he became a successful wool merchant and aspired to live like a gentleman. Hedwig never learned English well, but she passed on her love of the arts to her firstborn. Of their six children, Alfred remained his parents’ favorite, even though he believed that he had been displaced by his twin brothers, Julius and Leopold, born when he was three. “[He] would spend the rest of his life,” one biographer writes, “searching for a twin of his own.”

  Their house was full of guests, Stieglitz recalled, “musicians, artists, and literary folk, rather than business people. We had many books and pictures. Our dining room in Hoboken was in the basement….I had my hobby horse there and while the men would drink, talk and smoke, I loved to sit on my horse, riding and listening to the conversation.” His parents’ hospitality made a strong impression: “They created an atmosphere in which a certain kind of freedom could exist. This may well account for my seeking a related sense of liberty as I grew up.”

  The Stieglitzes moved to Manhattan in 1871, after the birth of their last child. Their brownstone on East Sixtieth Street had modern comforts like steam heat; the sparsely settled terrain near Central Park allowed Alfred the liberty he craved. Edward enrolled him at the nondenominational Charlier Institute for Young Gentlemen, where he was first in his class, despite his refusal to memorize the poems he was assigned in declamation, a talent in which he would always excel. The school emphasized a high-mindedness that was compatible with his father’s rejection of Jewish beliefs in favor of a principled atheism.

  Alfred learned as much at home as he did at school. Edward taught him his own hobbies, including billiards, a love of horsemanship, and a knowledge of wines, but he became angry when Alfred failed to satisfy his demands for excellence. Edward stressed ethical probity rather than spiritual training. That the family was Jewish was not discussed. At a time when Reform Judaism appealed to many of their middle-class brethren, the Stieglitz children thought of themselves as “ex-Jews,” members of a small aristocratic tribe presided over by Edward.

  Fortunately for her children, Hedwig was a woman of great warmth. She was also an avid reader, particularly of the German romantics—Schiller, Heine, Goethe, whose emphasis on the “living quality” of thought she shared with her son. As a boy, Alfred alternated between bouts of exercise and stints of reading everything from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Goethe’s Faust. When Hedwig asked his opinion of Faust, he replied, “There are two things that attract me in it, Marguerite and the Devil.” (A biographer notes that “in the pure and virtuous Marguerite he saw his mother—and in the clever, cavalier, powerful, and wicked Mephistopheles, his father.”) Alfred was aware of Edward’s nightly trips to visit the chambermaid. Rereading Faust in his teens, he was drawn to Helen of Troy, the Eternal Woman whose aura blended the stirrings of sexual feeling with the wish for unconditional love. He suffered so often from dark moods that family members called him “Little Hamlet.”

  Alfred’s melancholy lifted every summer when the Stieglitzes repaired to Lake George, a step deemed necessary for his health and for his father’s avocation, oil painting. They stayed at fashionable watering spots until 1886, when Edward purchased Oaklawn, an imposing Queen Anne house on the ten-mile stretch known as Millionaires’ Row. This gabled mansion became the family compound, and, in time, the antidote to Stieglitz’s life in New York.

  He observed years later that he had been uprooted by his father’s decision to take him out of the Charlier school to prepare for a career as an engineer—a profession in which he had no interest. Alfred was accepted by the City College of New York’s engineering program but felt uprooted there, although he did well. In 1881, Edward decided to sell his business and live for a time in Germany, where, he believed, teaching standards were more exacting.

  Stieglitz often said that his engineering course at the Berlin Polytechnic had meant little to him. At the time, while these classes did not stir his imagination, the discovery of a photography shop inspired him to learn the new medium. After buying a camera, developing trays, and a manual, he set up shop in his student quarters. Stieglitz believed that he had taken up photography as a free spirit; one might also see in his chosen medium one that avoided competition with his father.

  The young man then began to take Hermann Vogel’s Polytechnic classes in photography, where he worked diligently for the next two years, experimenting with the chemistry and optics of the medium—the effects of light on the reactions that take place in the printing process. Alfred soon outstripped Vogel’s expectations, spending weeks printing his photographs of classical images, including a statue of Goethe with the muses of poetry, drama, and science beneath his feet.

  Alfred’s Berlin years afforded him an education in living differently from his father. (Ironically, it was Edward’s business sense that produced in his son a fierce opposition to commercialism while providing his modest allowance.) Like his parents, he attended concerts, plays, and the opera, but he also frequented the racetrack and the Bauer Café, which was open day and night. It was the time in his life when he felt most free, with no social obligations and no one to interfere with his calling.

  The young man was also free to dream about his feminine ideal. In a journal begun the day after his twentieth birthday, Alfred wrote that his idea of good fortune was to be loved, but that he despaired of finding someone who would do so. Like many twenty-year-olds, he was self-absorbed, moody, and keenly interested in the opposite sex. Although he claimed to have had his first sexual experience that year, it seems likely that his initiation did not take place until he was twenty-five, when he returned to Berlin from New York to show work in an 1889 exhibition timed to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of photography’s invention.

  Judging by the photographs Alfred took that summer of a woman named Paula, he was in love with her, even though she was a prostitute. Sun Rays—Paula, Berlin shows his model in a large feathered hat and her hair in a chignon (signs of respectability) as she sits writing at a table (another sign of respect). The light streaming through the blinds casts patterned shadows on the wall; the photographs behind her include Alfred’s self-portrait, a head shot of Paula, and three valentines. This ode to domestic bliss, suggesting a Vermeer interior, symbolized his coming of age. (Stieglitz later said that he had fathered a child by another woman in Munich, to whom he sent an annual allowance.)

  By then, Stieglitz was steeped in the geist of bohemian Berlin and the romanticism of German culture. Deeply impressed by Wagner, he believed in the idea of expressing the times through new forms of art. And while Goethe remained his favorite author, he was also reading Byron, Zola, Whitman, and Twain—reminders of his roots, like the American flag he placed above a portrait of his mother in an early photograph entitled My Room.

  Yet being American would not have blinded him to the nascent anti-Semitism of the time, when the Christian Socialists made prejudice a plank in their platform and extremists called Jews a nati
onal threat. Anti-American sentiments were also freely expressed. After one of his teachers told the class that the recently completed Brooklyn Bridge would soon collapse, Stieglitz stood up for this marvel of Yankee engineering: “It was, after all, my America I was defending.”

  * * *

  . . .

  Stieglitz returned to the United States in 1890 with a portfolio of photographs, a sense of culture based on the German model, and a command of photographic technique. What he lacked was a way to provide for himself. It was depressing to return to his parents’ home, since Edward kept urging him to do something practical. He joined the Society of Amateur Photographers (known as the SAP) and attended its meetings, but collegiality did not compensate for the lack of a companion.

  After nine years abroad, he was also suffering from culture shock. New York was noisy and crass, “the spiritual emptiness of life…bewildering.” Worse, the country’s materialist bent had infiltrated photography. The Kodak camera, recently introduced by George Eastman, seemed to redefine the practice of photography. Kodak’s slogan, “You push the button and we do the rest,” was an affront, Stieglitz recalled with a note of exasperation. “I had been brought up with the idea of the tripod and awaiting one’s moment.” At twenty-six, he felt like “a fish out of water,” having remembered America like “a fairytale.”

  Stieglitz approached his first commercial venture in an equally unrealistic spirit. Soon after his return, an acquaintance persuaded him to become acting director of a firm specializing in three-color reproductions. He accepted despite his sense that he was unsuited to business, then persuaded two friends from Berlin, Joe Obermeyer and Lou Schubart, to be his partners. They would learn what they needed to know from their employees and become one family working for a common good—an approach recalling William Morris’s utopianism.

  At first, Alfred took no salary; the firm charged high prices and paid generous wages. But it soon became clear that their few customers—for calling cards and advertising posters—were more interested in cutting costs than in fine engraving. By 1895, after trying in vain to persuade their clients to respect quality, Alfred resigned and gave the workers his shares—a gesture combining his antipatriarchal stance with his anticapitalist ethos.

  He had made a commitment two years earlier that would prove difficult to undo. At twenty-nine, Alfred became engaged to Emmeline Obermeyer, his partner’s sister (she was twenty). Her background was similar to his (she had been educated in Europe); the Obermeyer fortune (the family-owned breweries) would alleviate the pressure to earn a living; Alfred’s alliance with Joe, his future brother-in-law, would be cemented. But Emmy had little feeling for the arts and, judging by his photographs of her at Lake George, lacked the allure that had drawn him to Paula and would suffuse his portraits of O’Keeffe. Alfred agreed to marry Emmy once she assured him that her income (three thousand dollars per year) would cover their expenses; his father promised to match this sum. Everyone seemed pleased except the prospective groom.

  A series of wintry scenes taken in New York that year convey the emotional weather of their union. Alfred grew fond of Emmy during their engagement, but in his view, once married, she turned prudish, at first refusing to let him caress her or photograph her in the nude. Emmy, who was not as impressionable as Alfred had supposed, must have hoped that he would accede to her wish for the life to which people of their milieu were accustomed—evenings at the theater, dinners with friends, trips to Europe. In his frustration, he lost patience when he came to see that Emmy could not be molded into the companion he desired.

  Their wedding trip, a five-month tour of France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, became the occasion for Alfred to devote himself to photography while Emmy shopped. When she tried to please him by going on an expedition in the Alps, he left her behind because she was too frightened to take the mountain railway. The scenes he photographed in Italy—street urchins, laundresses, gossiping neighbors—meant little to her. Emmy cared only for what to Alfred were frivolous things, preferring to patronize the best boutiques rather than immerse herself in art.

  His disappointment is implicit in his portrait of a fisherman’s wife taken in Holland during their trip, The Net Mender. This meditative image, recalling art by the Barbizon school, became one of his favorites. “Every stitch in the mending of the fishing net,” Stieglitz wrote, “brings forth a torrent of poetic thoughts in those who watch her sit there on the vast and seemingly endless dunes.” But life with Emmy brought forth no such thoughts. After their return to New York, she could not have helped noticing when Alfred gave pride of place in their salon to a framed print of The Net Mender.

  In his view, their marriage failed to provide the rapport needed to nourish creative vision. Feeling more alone than ever, Stieglitz returned to the scenes of Manhattan begun the year before with Winter—Fifth Avenue, a photograph of a cabdriver urging his horses on through blinding wind and snow. This picture can be seen as a symbolic self-portrait: “He felt that the driver struggling against the blasts of a great storm represented his own plight as an artist in a philistine city.” (And, one might add, in an unrewarding marriage.) Yet this image was also the start of a new phase in his work—and a fresh basis for “so-called ‘American Photography.’ ”

  Stieglitz’s love of challenging subjects, such as street scenes shot in rain or snow, inaugurated the set of images that he hoped would comprise a portrait of the city. He intended to take one hundred photographs of New York, a project that would not only express his sense of reality but earn for photography the recognition long denied it as an art. While the series was never completed, some of its images are artistic milestones. The Terminal, a study of another cabdriver watering his horses, is both a tour de force and a spiritual statement: “A driver I saw tenderly caring for his steaming car horses in a snow-covered street came to symbolize for me my own growing awareness that unless what we do is born of sacred feeling, there can be no fulfillment in life.”

  At the time, his lack of fulfillment at home fed into his increasingly scrappy response to opposition. For the rest of the 1890s, Stieglitz would agitate to win recognition for photography as an art, despite its “mechanical” nature. Rather than reproductions of reality, he and a few like-minded men, he argued, were making “pictures” in which composition and perspective mattered as much as in painting. By claiming that these “pictorial” prints had their own integrity, he was also writing off colleagues who did not endorse his view, those whose images evoked Impressionism to justify their work as “Art.” True pictorialism aimed not at aesthetic effects, but at simplicity, which was “the key to all art—a conviction that anybody who has studied the masters must arrive at.”

  By 1892, when this statement appeared in Photographic Mosaics, Stieglitz was on a crusade to convert those colleagues whose work he deemed “technically perfect, pictorially rotten.” He told a friend, “I would rather be a first-class photographer in a community of first-class photographers than the greatest photographer in a community of nonentities.” But his idea of community would prove to be divisive. After two years as the unpaid editor of The Amateur American Photographer he was promoted to full editorship in 1895. Soon his policies made him so unpopular at the SAP that he was asked to step down. Stieglitz then claimed that he had chosen to resign: The problem lay with the SAP’s divisions between the ruling “dress suits” and his allies, the “democrats.”

  But the situation was no better at the New York Camera Club, whose founding members, mainly hobbyists, had seceded from the SAP in 1888. In league with the like-minded from both clubs, Stieglitz waged a campaign to merge the two bodies into a new society, the Camera Club of New York. Its headquarters on West Twenty-ninth Street became his second home.

  Stieglitz also hoped to turn the Camera Club into an arbiter of excellence in a journal to be called Camera Notes; given his editorial experience, the members decided he was the man for the job. The fir
st issue appeared in 1897, its dark green cover embossed with a sunflower—an Art Nouveau motif that evoked a fresh start. It would contain only work showing “the development of an organic idea,” he wrote, “a picture rather than a photograph, though photography must be the method of graphic representation.”

  “I had a mad idea that the Club could become the world center of photography,” Stieglitz observed much later. To this end, he focused his energy on the politics of photography in Europe and at home, where, he believed, annual exhibitions of the best work were needed to win acceptance in the art world. The intensity of his focus, wielded through his editorship of Camera Notes and participation in shows as juror and artist, made him pictorialism’s foremost spokesman. It also enabled him to spend most of his days at the club.

  For a time, following the conception of their only child, Emmy’s pregnancy brought about a thaw in their relations. They moved to a large apartment at 1111 Madison Avenue, where she presided over the staff; Alfred claimed a study on the understanding that nothing in it would be disturbed. Katherine Stieglitz, known as Kitty, was born on September 27, 1898. Almost immediately, her father began taking her picture—in Emmy’s arms, at Lake George, and later, fashionably dressed, on city streets with her equally fashionable mother. Alfred’s record of Kitty’s development comprised the portrait he called The Photographic Journal of a Baby when it was shown in London in 1900.

  Stieglitz’s idea of an evolving photographic portrait owed much to a related medium, cinema. He said later of his images of O’Keeffe, “To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.” Years later, when Charlie Chaplin came to see the O’Keeffe portraits, Stieglitz told him that the prints were the prelude to an idea he had had in mind for years: a film of “all parts of a woman’s body, showing the development of a life.” Only a serial portrait could provide a full record. But when Emmy complained that he was making Kitty self-conscious, Alfred photographed her less often.