CHAPTER 2
Portrait of 291
1905–1913
After a festive dinner at Mouquin’s, Stieglitz and a few friends strolled up Fifth Avenue for the inaugural show at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. The opening took place on November 25, 1905—“without the stereotyped press-view or similar antiquated functions” but with the sense that little implied a disdain for the status-conscious behavior common at such events.
After admiring the sign on the door, with the words Photo and Secession on each side of a golden disk, the gallery’s emblem, they took the rickety elevator to the top floor. There they stepped into a hallway painted in pale blue, salmon, and olive gray, an intentionally moderne palette. In the larger of the two rooms, photographs were shown in dark frames on walls hung with olive gray burlap, complemented by olive gray curtains around the room at waist height to conceal storage. The smaller room balanced this color scheme with prints in white frames against the burlap on the walls. One hundred prints by thirty-nine of the Secessionists, including Steichen, Käsebier, White, and Stieglitz, hung in rows, with just enough space between to set off each print from those on either side.
Steichen’s decor won approval from the Stieglitz group; others saw it as ostentatious simplicity. Charles FitzGerald, a supporter of the Ashcan School, fulminated in The Evening Sun, “The vanity of these people is unbelievable. The fopperies displayed in their work, their eccentric frames, the whimsical flourishes in which they habitually indulge, and their incurable gravity—all these are but symptomatic of their essential frivolity.”
FitzGerald’s disdain did not keep those who were curious about photography from finding their way to 291. Some fifteen thousand came during the first season, when Stieglitz exhibited the works of, among others, David Octavius Hill, Frederick Evans, White, Käsebier, and Steichen—a retrospective followed by an issue of Camera Work with ten of his images. Stieglitz was pleased to note that sixty-one prints had sold in the first year, Steichen’s sales outnumbering those of his colleagues.
The gallery became the place to see art that was new “in impulse and form,” the progressive journalist Hutchins Hapgood recalled. “Persons from many different social groups went to ‘291’—rich, poor, conventional, bohemian, successful, unsuccessful, smug, contented, unhappy.” Repeated exposure made them feel “more alive…more sensitive to reality.” Another regular appreciated the sense of repose that he found there: “You forgot all about New York, the rush of the subway; and the struggle after the almighty dollar.”
Given the gallery’s location, prosperous New Yorkers sometimes found themselves mingling with the denizens of Greenwich Village. Three blocks north, on Fifth Avenue at Thirty-fourth Street, the grand buildings of the original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel provided a venue where women could appear without escorts. Nearby, Stanford White’s Knickerbocker Trust building marked the area’s ongoing change from residential to commercial. When 291 opened in 1905, White’s firm was building equally grand headquarters a few blocks to the north for the rival jewelers Gorham and Tiffany. White visited 291 to see Käsebier’s portraits of himself and Evelyn Nesbit Thaw, his mistress, a few months before her husband killed him—an event replayed in “the Trial of the Century,” as it was called in the tabloids.
Brownstones in the area sheltered art galleries, photo studios like Steichen’s, and small cafés catering to the locals. Stieglitz moved his “round table” from Mouquin’s to the Holland House, a sumptuous hotel at Fifth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, whose marble staircase echoed the decor of its London namesake. Every day he and his guests repaired to the hotel restaurant, where the Louis Quinze furnishings must have seemed at odds with the style of 291. Emmy continued to provide an allowance for such occasions. About this time, Gertrude Käsebier photographed Emmy looking pensive: With her ring hand, she holds a portfolio embossed with the Photo-Secession’s golden disk, the symbol of all that Alfred preferred to their union.
* * *
. . .
Steichen grew restive after the success of his one-man show at 291. His portrait business was thriving, but it irked him to hear it said that having your picture taken by him was the thing to do. He told Stieglitz that he would soon return to Paris, a turn of events that elated Emmy. Since the lease on 291 was about to expire, she and Alfred would be free to travel. “You can give up all that nonsense,” she told him, “for without Steichen you can’t go ahead.” The next day, he signed the lease for two more years and agreed to manage Steichen’s affairs in his absence. “Steichen had become the older man’s most energetic ally, and sometimes he felt that he and Stieglitz carried the entire pictorial photography movement on their shoulders.”
In a way, Steichen was right. Following his departure, while most Secessionists remained committed to the cause, relations among them became complicated due to professional rivalries. Some thought they had won the war: “The real battle for the recognition of pictorial photography is over,” Joseph Keiley wrote in Camera Work. “The chief purpose for which the Photo-Secession was established has been accomplished.”
But if the battle had been won, how was Stieglitz to pursue the vision that had inspired him to start the gallery? In December, a young woman showed up when he was feeling discouraged about what to do next. She introduced herself as Pamela Colman Smith, from London, where she published a magazine with contributions by Yeats, Gordon Craig, and other artists. After looking at her artwork, Stieglitz offered her a show to open on January 5, 1907. “Smith is a young woman with that quality rare in either sex—imagination,” James Huneker wrote in The New York Sun. His review brought well-to-do New Yorkers; Stieglitz prepared a portfolio of Smith’s paintings and watercolors.
It was a happy accident that his protégée possessed a gift prized in fin de siècle aesthetics—that of synesthesia. Pieces like Beethovenesque and The Devil’s Sonata, Smith explained, were “thoughts loosened and set free by the spell of sound.” Ideas of loosening and setting oneself free of restraints were everywhere in Symbolist art, but their link to sensual freedom had rarely been evoked by a pretty woman who was also an artist. We can see in Stieglitz’s response to Smith an anticipation of his enthusiasm for O’Keeffe’s drawings a decade later.
That spring, Alfred pursued his preoccupation with the topic “Woman” with Clarence White: Their collaboration was meant to demonstrate “the pliability of straight photography as a medium for portraiture and figure work.” The men hired two models to pose for them—dressed, partly undressed, and in the nude. While some of their prints suggest classical statues, their soft-focus interpretation of “pliability” also hints at these artists’ interest in the female body. Stieglitz published a portrait and the most evocative of the nudes in Camera Work.
During the 1907–1908 season, exhibitions at 291 shared a theme—the female figure. Stieglitz’s stated purpose—to stir discussion among the Secessionists through the display of oils, drawings, watercolors, and sculpture—fit nicely with this theme, starting with Pamela Smith and culminating in the radical exhibitions sent from Paris by Steichen over the next few years. That the nude was a classic topos of art made it all the more appropriate to study its handling by contemporaries.
That winter, Steichen and Stieglitz had their first major misunderstanding when the younger man learned that Pamela Smith would be the first nonphotographer featured at 291. Since Steichen’s return to Paris, he had been choosing representative drawings by Rodin to inaugurate the gallery’s nonphotographic exhibitions, but Stieglitz had preempted him.
The two men patched things up that summer, when Steichen introduced Stieglitz to the Lumière Company’s autochrome process, which enabled one to take color photographs. (Autochromes were made by applying grains of colored starch to a glass plate, subjecting it to pressure, then adding silver bromide. The result, a glass transparency resembling a Pointillist painting, was viewed when held up to the light.) Stieglitz exper
imented with autochromes during his holiday in Europe with Kitty and Emmy. This series produced a poignant portrait of himself and Kitty: Alfred, holding his camera, gazes at his daughter, who rests one hand on the camera and the other on the flowers in her lap. His camera and her bouquet seem emblematic; she poses, reluctantly, as his young muse.
Stieglitz went on making delicate color studies of family and friends, displaying these autochromes along with color prints by other Secessionists in the first show of the 1907–1908 season at 291. That fall, when Paul Strand visited the gallery with his camera class, the young man decided that he, too, would become a photographer—whether or not work of this kind would help him earn a living.
Stieglitz’s interest in autochromes waned as other matters became more pressing. In October, the downfall of the Knickerbocker Trust produced a currency crisis. Banks around the country barred their doors against depositors seeking to remove their savings. Market liquidity all but evaporated until J. P. Morgan shored up the financial system with large infusions of cash. Still, thousands lost their investments, among them Alfred’s parents. It would have been dispiriting to see them having to move to more modest quarters and to admit that in such a time an art gallery was an extravagance.
On January 2, 1908, when confidence in the commercial system was at a low ebb, Stieglitz opened an exhibition of Rodin’s “howlers”—the pencil and watercolor nudes sure to create a stir. Rodin had traced every contour of his models’ bodies as they danced around his studio, bent over each other’s swooning forms, or baring their private parts. To ensure that viewers got the point, Stieglitz printed an excerpt from Arthur Symons’s essay on Rodin’s muse in the catalog: “Every movement of her body, violently agitated by the remembrance, or the expectation, of the act of desire, is seen at an expressive moment. She turns upon herself in a hundred attitudes, turning always upon the central pivot of the sex.”
The show soon became a scandal. Rodin’s nudes were “not the sort of thing to offer to public view,” W. B. McCormick declared in the New York Press, and Symons’s defense was “inspired nonsense.” At a time when Anthony Comstock’s Society for the Suppression of Vice had resumed its campaign against the dissemination of lewd materials, Rodin’s drawings challenged “the prurient prudery of our puritanism,” J. N. Laurvik wrote in the Times. He continued: “One marvels that this little gallery has not long since been raided by the blind folly that guards our morals.”
The Rodin exhibition also provoked similar feelings of outrage in the academy. William Merritt Chase, the well-known American Impressionist, told his classes at the Art Students League that Rodin’s nudes were preposterous. Although he himself intended to boycott the gallery, they should see for themselves. One day, the twenty-year-old Georgia O’Keeffe trudged through the snow with her classmates to see what the fuss was about. Rodin’s drawings struck her as so many scribbles; she retreated to the back room when Stieglitz and the others began arguing about them. “I had never heard anything like it,” O’Keeffe recalled. “There wasn’t any place in New York where anything like this was shown.”
* * *
. . .
“I have another cracker-jack exhibition for you,” Steichen told Stieglitz while the Rodins were stirring up controversy. On his return to New York in March 1908, he would bring work by “the most modern of the moderns,” the Fauvist Henri Matisse.
Years later, Stieglitz would look back on the Matisse exhibition as “the first blow of ‘Modernity’ in America.” At the time, when Matisse was not well known, Stieglitz was more interested in his radicality than in his artistry. “Here was the work of a new man, with new ideas—a very anarchist, it seemed, in art,” he proclaimed in Camera Work. Stieglitz hoped that Matisse would provoke the same outrage in Manhattan as he had in Paris.
He was not disappointed. Most critics took the term fauve to mean “wild man.” The show, one of them wrote, “brought a recurrence of red wrath.” James Huneker called Matisse an outlaw: “Compared to these memoranda of the gutter and brothel, the sketches of Rodin are academic.” Edgar Chamberlin sneered, “There are some female figures that…seem to condemn this man’s brain to the limbo of artistic degeneration.” Stieglitz reprinted their reviews in Camera Work along with Charles Caffin’s thoughts on the artist: “This is not the ocular but the mental impression that he is intent on rendering,” Caffin reflected.
That winter, the Camera Club issued Stieglitz with a different kind of challenge. Its membership had declined after he formed the Photo-Secession; the club was almost bankrupt; the trustees blamed him for this situation and asked him to resign. When he refused, they expelled him and told him to remove his belongings. The New York Times publicized the case; Stieglitz brought suit against the club, then tendered his resignation when the trustees offered to reinstate him.
Stieglitz told Agnes Ernst, an attractive young journalist who interviewed him at this time, that he was ready to set out on the search for ultimate truth. Theories about art and life were all too narrow, he insisted: They lacked “that perfect freedom which we are looking for.” Warming to her presence, he continued: “If only people are taught to appreciate the beautiful side of their daily existence,…they must gradually approach this ideal.” Some months later, Ernst wrote to Stieglitz from Paris, where she had gone at his urging: “I feel almost like an apostle, and every time a Camera Work comes, I wave it like a red flag in the face of my friends.”
But some of his usual supporters were losing faith. Once Stieglitz began showing nonphotographic art, several Secessionists resigned. That winter, when the gallery’s lease was about to expire, Stieglitz concluded that he could not maintain both 291 and Camera Work. Once he decided not to renew the lease, Steichen stripped the walls and packed up the contents. A few days after the close of the Matisse show, a tailor moved into the rooms where thousands of Americans had been introduced to modern art.
Then a “miracle” occurred—in the guise of a patron, the French-born, Harvard-educated Paul Haviland, who represented his family firm in the United States. The young man had made repeated visits to the gallery during the Rodin show. On learning that it was to close, he signed a three-year lease for the room across the hall and offered it to Stieglitz, who was unsure whether to continue in this reduced space even though Haviland proposed to redecorate to his specifications.
Stieglitz retreated to Lake George to ponder the future. A thought came to him: “Why not continue the ‘work’ in one room? Why not turn that room virtually into a facsimile of the main older room, so that when people came…they would feel at home?” On his return to Manhattan, his friend J. B. Kerfoot discussed the need for support with some photography buffs, including George Dupont Pratt of Standard Oil and Herbert French of Proctor & Gamble, who agreed to cover the rent. Months later, after the death of his father in 1909, Stieglitz began drawing on his inheritance to cover the other costs of running 291 and Camera Work: “I could not let the idea of money get in the way of doing work properly.”
The gallery would still be known as 291, although it was housed at 293 Fifth Avenue, the common wall having been removed to install the elevator that served both buildings. In the new scheme, visitors stepping into the top-floor hallway encountered one exceptional print or drawing, placed there to whet their appetites for the main room. Stieglitz worked in a small room at the back whenever the occupant, a decorator, was away. When visitors arrived, he rushed into the gallery, where a suspended scrim diffused the sun coming through the skylight. “He was always there, talking, talking, talking, talking in parables, arguing, explaining,” Steichen recalled.
Although the talk went on nonstop, Haviland thought of the gallery as “a quiet nook in a city of conflict.” In the next phase of 291’s existence, the Limoges heir became Stieglitz’s collaborator and learned photography under his guidance. Stieglitz published Haviland’s essays and images in Camera Work and made him an editor in 1910; his portrait o
f the well-dressed Frenchman shows his appreciation of his sensibility. With Steichen scouting for “howlers” in Paris and Haviland as second in command, Stieglitz had the support he had long desired.
* * *
. . .
The gallery would continue to “champion modern tendencies,” Haviland wrote in Camera Work, “as an attitude toward life.” To those who complained that it no longer served the Photo-Secession, Stieglitz replied that showing other forms of art would stimulate photographers and nonphotographers alike by stirring up exchanges that transcended the limits of their training.
A 291 picnic at Mount Kisco, 1912. Left to right: Paul Haviland, Abraham Walkowitz, Katharine Rhoades, Emmy Stieglitz, Agnes Ernst, Alfred Stieglitz, J. B. Kerfoot, and John Marin
That spring, the gallery took the unusual step of showing work by the Americans Alfred Maurer and John Marin, both of whom belonged to the expatriate group recently founded by Steichen—the New Society of American Artists in Paris. Before sending their oils to New York, Steichen told Stieglitz that Maurer’s landscapes would be this season’s “howlers.” Stieglitz contrasted the two artists’ temperaments by grouping the vivid Maurers in rows on one wall and the delicate Marins in a line on another. “Marin’s watercolors sang their quiet song while the Maurers seemed like instruments of music run riot,” he recalled; as expected, the critics denounced Maurer’s Fauvist palette and praised Marin’s harmonies. From then on, Stieglitz displayed artworks to encourage dialogue among them.
Foursome Page 4