Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  As the subject of an extended portrait Manhattan was always available. In 1897, Stieglitz began a series of nocturnal images with Reflections: Night—New York, a study of light shimmering on the pavement. The next winter, convalescing from pneumonia, he left his bed at one a.m. to photograph a desolate scene in Central Park—two rows of leafless trees looming like specters in the lamplight. The halation (the blur or halo) around the sources of light preserved their luminosity, he explained in “Night Photography with the Introduction of Life,” an article printed in the 1898 American Annual of Photography. Another series, taken in the rain at Madison Square, blends urban and pastoral elements in compositions that show an affinity with Arts and Crafts aesthetics. Spring Showers—The Street Cleaner and its companion, Spring Showers—The Coach share the linearity that would distinguish Stieglitz’s photograph of the Flatiron Building, on the south side of the square.

  By 1900, Stieglitz was a dominant force at the Camera Club, a role he worked vigorously to maintain. He showed his work there and published numerous articles on photography as well as a portfolio, Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies; he was a forceful juror in the annual salons and exercised his influence in Camera Notes. According to Theodore Dreiser, who interviewed him there, “His attitude toward the club has come to be the club’s attitude toward the world. He openly avows that he has planned to accomplish three things: first, to elevate the standard of photography in this country; second, to establish an annual national exhibition…third, to establish a national academy of photography.”

  Dreiser also wrote a feature on Stieglitz for Success magazine’s “Life Stories of Successful Men”—a series including Andrew Carnegie, Marshall Field, and Thomas Edison. Stieglitz dominated the field of photography to such an extent that there was “no longer any dispute as to his leadership,” Dreiser wrote. The critic Sadakichi Hartmann seconded his opinion: “Not only during my first visit but often since, it has seemed to me that artistic photography, the Camera Club, and Alfred Stieglitz were only three names for the same thing.”

  That next year, the English art critic Charles Caffin appraised Stieglitz’s standing in Photography as a Fine Art. Stieglitz had received “a full share of knocks from antagonists,” and was himself “an accomplished thumper,” yet the role of spokesman had been forced on him by his preeminence. Caffin, who had once been critical of Stieglitz, now admired “the rare balance in him of scientific knowledge and artistic feeling.” At the center of the volume, on the work of the most “advanced” photographers (including Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence White, and Frank Eugene), Caffin placed Frank Eugene’s portrait of Stieglitz—as if he were, without question, photography’s leading light.

  Frank Eugene, Alfred Stieglitz, 1901

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  By the time these assessments appeared in print, some of those who had been “thumped” by Stieglitz were plotting to challenge his leadership. But if he made any resolutions on January 1, 1900—his thirty-sixth birthday—they did not include plans for compromise. Given his need to dominate and his demands for loyalty, the pattern of volatile relations with colleagues would recur. Moreover, he thrived on controversy. Up to this point, he thought of his allies as photography’s “democrats”: In the new century they would become its “revolutionaries.”

  In 1900, resentment of his influence came into focus at the club. Members complained when he rejected their submissions to Camera Notes; they grumbled about his lack of respect for those who were not pictorialists. In response to complaints about his high-handedness, Stieglitz resigned from the vice presidency. And although the U.S. government had commissioned him to choose photographs for the Exposition Universelle in Paris that summer, he resigned from this post as well on learning that his selections would hang not in the Fine Arts pavilion but with the Liberal Arts (or crafts).

  The only bright spot that spring was his meeting with the painter and photographer Edward Steichen, who had stopped in New York on his way to Paris. When the young midwesterner showed Stieglitz his prints, Stieglitz was so taken with Steichen’s atmospheric images that he bought three and promised to reproduce them in Camera Notes. After asking Steichen if he meant to abandon the camera in favor of the paintbrush, he was reassured by his reply: “I shall use the camera as long as I live; for it can say things that cannot be said in any other medium.”

  That night, Alfred told Emmy, “I think I’ve found my man.” Like Stieglitz, Steichen’s background was European. His parents brought him from Luxembourg to the United States when he was two; he grew up in Milwaukee, a city with a large German population. Having saved enough from his work as a commercial artist to move to France, he had a determination that reminded Stieglitz of his own. Over the next two years, their correspondence would keep Stieglitz informed of cultural trends in Paris while Steichen pursued his plan to photograph celebrities—a project that led to his famous portraits of Rodin.

  Meanwhile, the conservatives at the club renewed their complaints about Stieglitz. That fall, he convened the members to make a politic (if self-serving) confession: “Camera Notes was a lie; its tone, assumed by the public to represent the tone and standard of the Club, was in reality far in advance of that of the larger body of Club-members.” The group gave him a vote of confidence, but a few months later it endorsed a separation of powers: He would edit Camera Notes, while the conservatives would take charge of other business.

  His opponents having won the day concerning exhibitions, Stieglitz accepted an invitation to choose American photographs for the Glasgow International Exposition of 1901. (Prints by Eugene, White, Käsebier, Steichen, and Stieglitz would dominate.) He also started looking for a new venue for a show of American photography. In November, Charles de Kay, the art editor of The New York Times and founder of the National Arts Club, told Stieglitz that his group could house such an exhibition in the club’s Thirty-fourth Street mansion. Stieglitz agreed, provided he would have control over the selections and how they were hung.

  That winter, Stieglitz announced the existence of a new society, the Photo-Secession. Who belonged? de Kay asked. “Yours truly,” he replied. Others would be invited to join once the show was up, though the word secession might alarm Americans, who would think of the Civil War: “Photo-Secession implies a seceding from the accepted idea of what constitutes a photograph…in Europe—in Germany and in Austria—splits have occurred in art circles, the moderns calling themselves Secessionists. So Photo-Secession hitches up with the art world.”

  The provocative new name piqued Manhattanites’ interest when The New York Times ran a piece on Stieglitz’s nonexistent group. On March 5, opening night (which was mobbed despite terrible weather), he spoke on “Pictorial Photography and What It Means,” and, after the lecture, he told a puzzled Käsebier that she was a Secessionist as long as she felt like one. Visitors noted that the show gave pride of place to Steichen.

  Looking back at the 1902 show as the Photo-Secession’s seminal moment, Stieglitz wrote, “Those of a similar mind and ideals found themselves unconsciously drawn closer and closer…these kindred spirits would act as a unit.” But at the time, this sentiment was more of a wish than a reality. Ten days before the opening, he gave notice to the Camera Club that he would resign as editor of Camera Notes. About to stir up controversy on his own terms, Stieglitz felt ready to “struggle” (one of his favorite words) on behalf of the new society. But rather than resign from the club, he remained a member and gave its address as that of the Photo-Secession, since neither he nor his allies had darkrooms.

  A number of people soon decided that they, too, were Secessionists, even though membership was by invitation. (Stieglitz enraged a club member by telling him that he was not a Secessionist, even though three of his prints had hung at the National Arts Club.) For the rest of the year, he invited those whose work he admired to become fellows, seven of whom (including Steichen) formed the council that
voted on other applicants. But what was the nature of their cause? Steichen observed that “no one but Stieglitz seemed to know just what ‘Photo-Secession’ meant.”

  Steichen returned to New York that fall with the aim of setting himself up as a portraitist. Stieglitz was proud that Steichen’s photographs had been admitted to the 1902 Salon de la Societé Nationale in Paris, even though the jury refused to hang them because they believed that photography did not qualify as art. After two years in Paris, Steichen was a changed man. He had taken to wearing a large black hat and a cape, and, having gained confidence from his success in the art world and with the many women who fell for him, he had a bit of a swagger. Stieglitz’s photos of the Photo-Secession show struck the young man as “rather helter-skelter”; he felt “a little belligerent” about the group in whose inner council he had been enrolled in his absence. But when Stieglitz outlined his plans for Camera Work, the new magazine in which he would feature Secessionists (starting with Käsebier) and critics like Caffin, Steichen agreed to come on board.

  Soon the group was meeting regularly, often at Mouquin’s, a French restaurant on Sixth Avenue at Twenty-eighth Street. Associates were invited to join (including Emmy, who contributed funds); Alfred was chosen as president, but finding the title “too ostentatious,” accepted that of director. The Secession’s aims were then clarified in Camera Work: “To advance photography as applied to pictorial expression; to draw together those Americans practicing or otherwise interested in the art, and to hold from time to time, at varying places, exhibitions not necessarily limited to the productions of the Photo-Secession.” Stieglitz had founded the group because he was “battling…for a new spirit in life that went deeper than mere preoccupation with what is termed ‘photography.’ ”

  Steichen joined the battle for practical reasons. While he looked to Stieglitz as an established master, he, too, needed to make his name. The support of the best-known spokesman for photography would prove invaluable. Stieglitz invited Steichen to his home; he introduced him at the club and to his family. But while Stieglitz recognized his talent, “he was not for a moment inclined to be a father figure to a handsome younger man.” Still, Steichen valued Alfred’s support as well as that of the Stieglitz clan, who told their friends of his skill as a portraitist.

  Soon after Steichen rented a studio at 291 Fifth Avenue, near the club, he urged Stieglitz to devote the first issue of Camera Work to his work rather than Käsebier’s. Stieglitz promised Steichen the next issue and enlisted him in the magazine’s design. Steichen’s plain gray cover set off the white letters of the title’s Art Nouveau typeface, balanced by the Roman numerals used for each issue’s number; he designed the back cover (a Kodak ad, despite Stieglitz’s dislike of the firm) and selected the paper stock. Stieglitz made sure that the photogravures were of the highest quality. Camera Work was itself a work of art, a critic wrote—one marked by “the lover’s touch.”

  As promised, the second Camera Work featured the work of Steichen, including his self-portrait and a portrait of Rodin, with appreciations by Caffin and Sidney Allen (a nom de plume for Sadakichi Hartmann), whose account of his visit to Steichen’s studio called him photography’s new champion. In Allen’s view, Steichen’s portrait of Rodin with his Penseur was a masterpiece—proof that this kind of photography corresponded “to the special necessities of a democratic and levelling age.” Over its lifetime, Camera Work would devote three issues to Steichen and publish sixty-five reproductions of his work, more than that of any other photographer.

  In the meantime, the Stieglitz clan extended their hospitality to the young man when he announced his plan to marry the singer Clara Smith. Alfred attended their wedding, and the couple spent their honeymoon at the Stieglitz home at Lake George. For the next few years, the two men worked harmoniously, and without pay, to promote the Photo-Secession and Camera Work. In addition to Stieglitz’s allies at home, the review featured French pictorialist Robert Demachy and those British colleagues whose work he admired—Frederick Evans, David Octavius Hill, and J. Craig Annan. He displayed a range of photographers—those who favored unretouched images; the more painterly pictorialists like Steichen and Eugene, who manipulated their prints; and Käsebier, whose “artistic-commercial” portraits (Caffin’s term) fell between these two approaches. The illustrations evoked a mood, the kind of Symbolist brooding that seemed to support the claim that these machine-made images were works of art in their own right.

  The first issue ran a defense of the medium by George Bernard Shaw, himself an amateur photographer. From then on, Stieglitz published lively critiques of his artists’ work and essays on recent trends. He relied on Caffin to engage readers with his accounts of pictorialism and featured Hartmann’s provocative essays until the author fell out with him. Stieglitz also favored inside jokes in the form of fables or jests—like “The ABC of Photography,” by the critic J. B. Kerfoot. In another piece, Kerfoot combined inked silhouettes with word portraits of the Secessionists: Stieglitz was Alfred the Great, Käsebier “the Madonna of the Lens,” and Steichen one of the group’s “lions.”

  Stieglitz also spoke to Camera Work’s readers through a selection of his own prints. Of those that held special meaning for him, The Hand of Man (1902), a stark image of a train moving toward the viewer under billows of smoke, appeared in the first issue. The engine pushes forward on its own, as Stieglitz claimed that he had done; the title evokes fin de siècle debates about art in the machine age. Stieglitz’s friends would have grasped its meanings, as well as the reasons behind the choice of his image of the Flatiron Building, featured despite his father’s dislike of this edifice. “It is to America what the Parthenon was to Greece,” Stieglitz insisted, “a picture of the new America.” Perhaps he meant to imply that, like the Flatiron Building, Camera Work was itself an “amazing structure” combining “lightness” with “solidity.”

  By 1904, Stieglitz had worked himself into a state of exhaustion. He was about to go to Europe with Kitty and Emmy when Steichen took portraits of the six-year-old with each of her parents. Steichen’s favorite shows father and daughter facing the camera with arms linked. In another, Alfred hovers while Kitty stares at the camera. She is more at ease in Steichen’s portraits of her with Emmy, especially one in which their affection is implied in their stances (bodies turned to each other) and the visual rhyme of their loose white garments. Still, even though smiles were not common in such portraits, no one seems very happy, and none was taken of the three together. It is tempting to infer that the couple’s lack of harmony disturbed their daughter, yet inappropriate to speak of “familial dysfunction”—since we cannot know if Steichen arranged their poses or if they struck their own.

  A few days after arriving in Berlin, Alfred collapsed. He spent the next month reflecting on the last ten years. “During that period,” he wrote, “I had witnessed the evolution of pictorial photography and watched its struggles against the hostile environment of ignorance, prejudice, selfishness, vanity, conceit, intrigue, provincialism, and a host of other malign influences.” On the subject of Stieglitz’s hypochondria, a biographer notes, he “routinely exaggerated the gravity of his physical ailments to obtain sympathy, to secure his privacy from Emmy, and to provide the necessary background for his accounts of his heroic efforts on behalf of photography.” In this view, periodic breakdowns were the means by which he translated his distress into bodily terms.

  Alfred Stieglitz, Kitty and Emmeline, c. 1905–1906

  That same summer, Steichen wrote to say that he could not plan his future without Stieglitz’s advice. When Stieglitz returned to New York in October, he learned that Hartmann had turned on him in a diatribe published in The Photo-Beacon, “Little Tin Gods on Wheels.” While it did not mention Stieglitz by name, Hartmann’s slurs were obvious: “pictorialists throughout the land,” he asked, “will you any longer stand the undemocratic, un-American policy of these little T.G.O.W.?” Henceforth
, he would give his support to Stieglitz’s rival, Curtis Bell, who was gathering prints for an exhibition in December, to be known as the First American Photographic Salon. Stieglitz made a point of dismissing Bell’s salon. In Camera Work, he sneered that Bell’s jury examined ten thousand entries before choosing the more than three hundred substandard prints “with which the walls were literally plastered.”

  In response to the challenge, Stieglitz came up with the idea of an international exhibition of photography to be held in 1906. With Steichen’s help, he planned to display the best that had been done in Europe and the United States. For the next year, he scouted art galleries but was forced to conclude that it would be impossible to secure an appropriate space during the high point of the year, the spring season.

  One night when Stieglitz and Steichen were conversing in front of Steichen’s studio building, they came up with an alternative. They would rent rooms in which to hang the American and European sections of the exhibition they had in mind. Steichen had recently moved across the hall to a large studio with a skylight. His old studio was vacant; adjoining it were two small rooms that the landlord might rent to the same tenant. When Stieglitz expressed concern that they would not find enough good images to keep the rooms open during the season, Steichen said that they could show other works of art. Stieglitz signed a one-year lease; Steichen volunteered to design the gallery and oversee the renovations.

  In October, Stieglitz told the Secessionists about his plans for the rooms at 291 Fifth Avenue, to be known as the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. Soon the space would be called, simply, “291.” A biographer writes, “Eventually, ‘291’ came to be the mystical, numerological symbol of the conflation of Stieglitz’s personality, the gallery, and all that it represented. One could never be quite sure, when Stieglitz uttered the pregnant trinumeric formula, whether he was referring to the gallery or to himself.”