Foursome

by Carolyn Burke

  He was also concerned with the timing of new shows. To follow the Maurer-Marin exhibition Stieglitz decided to feature Steichen in April and Japanese prints in May. One day, a friend brought the Maine artist Marsden Hartley to the gallery because he felt that his visionary quality would intrigue Stieglitz. He decided to squeeze in a ten-day show of Hartley’s intensely rendered mountainscapes, but despite its favorable reception, nothing sold. Still, Hartley was touched by his welcome to 291—“the largest small room of its kind in the world.”

  Over the next few years, the gallery would introduce art by Americans and Europeans alike. In 1909, Steichen suggested another show of work by the members of the New Society of American Artists. Stieglitz reshaped this idea to present nine “Younger American Painters,” including Steichen, Maurer, Marin, Hartley, and two men new to the gallery, Max Weber and Arthur Dove. All were working “toward the realization of a new artistic ideal,” Haviland wrote. They shared “a departure from realistic representation, the aim toward color composition, the vitality of their work, and the cheerful key in which their canvases are painted.”

  When the “Younger Americans” show opened in 1910, the Times’ critic claimed not to understand their aim—“unless it is to make color and pattern do all the work.” Art of this kind upset “all our Western conceptions of a picture.” Surprisingly, following James Townsend’s quip that some of the nine were “vivisectionists,” he told readers of American Art News that the exhibit was “weirdly interesting.”

  About this time, energized by the critics’ grudging recognition of 291, Stieglitz returned to photography. Max Weber (who slept on the couch in the gallery’s back room) accompanied him on strolls around the city: Weber is the small figure observing the scene in Stieglitz’s Old and New York, which treats the Vanderbilt Hotel, then under construction, as a geometric grid behind Fifth Avenue’s brownstones. Over the summer, Stieglitz photographed the harbor from the deck of a ferryboat. This image, City of Ambition, can be seen as a graphic pattern in which the smoke billowing from the smokestacks forms a contrast to the distant buildings, but also as an image of “ruthless materialism…a statement about why advanced art found such a cold reception in New York.”

  For some time, Stieglitz had been choosing prints for the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography in Buffalo that fall, an event that would publicize 291’s defense of photography. Laboring to assemble a history of the art, he planned sections for old masters (including himself), moderns like Steichen, and a few Secessionists. Weber, White, and Haviland accompanied him to Buffalo to hang the show in the Albright Gallery, modernizing its decor with scrims to lower the ceilings and burlap wall coverings in the style of those at 291.

  “No show was ever better hung,” American Photography conceded—although the magazine’s critic could not resist calling Stieglitz the “Napoleon of pictorial photography.” Such praise only confirmed him in his views. He told a friend, “Even Mrs. Stieglitz who saw it finally realized that something has happened….It does mean one gigantic sacrifice, but everything lasting probably means that.”

  To some colleagues, the Buffalo exhibition seemed like a betrayal. Over the next few years Käsebier, White, and Weber would all fall out with Stieglitz. In a retrospective account of these years, he wrote serenely, “Just as the Photo-Secession had begun without formality so now, in the same manner, it gradually came to an end.” At the time, he was more prickly in a letter to a British friend: “I see none of the photographers…I don’t miss them. Not because they are not nice fellows but because they have not developed mentally but have stood still during the past six or seven years.”

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  On a given morning, a visitor to 291 might encounter the new “fellows”—those who, in Stieglitz’s view, were moving forward. The group arrived late, sat around the coal stove to discuss art, poetry, philosophy, and politics, then accompanied him to lunch at the Holland House. Regulars included Steichen, Haviland, Hartley, Marin, the journalists Benjamin De Casseres and Sadakichi Hartmann (who was back in Stieglitz’s good graces), Weber (before he fell out of them), Caffin, Kerfoot, and the poet Alfred Kreymborg. Stieglitz had created a space where all were welcome, Kreymborg thought—provided they upheld the group spirit.

  Other “experimenters” in the arts found their way to the gallery. In 1909, Stieglitz showed drawings of New Yorkers by the caricaturist Marius de Zayas, a show that, due to its acerbic spirit, failed to impress the critics. In 1910, he introduced Rousseau, and in 1911, Cézanne and Picasso—the season’s “red rag,” as Steichen foresaw. With Steichen’s help and that of Picasso’s friend Gertrude Stein, Picasso chose eighty-three of his drawings. Stieglitz bought an abstract nude because he could not, at first, “see” it: He came to think of it as a Bach fugue. Many art lovers dismissed Picasso as a madman. The Globe proclaimed, “The display is the most extraordinary combination of extravagance and absurdity that New York has been afflicted with.”

  Despite (or indeed because of) such responses, the past year had been “the most vital” of his career, Stieglitz told Hartmann, though he had taken few photographs. “I realize,” he added, “that in sacrificing my own photography I have gained something I could have never possessed in any other way”—an understanding of advanced art. Although he was out of step with the country, he did not feel hopeless. The reason for his optimism? Things were about to change: “We stand before the door of a new social era.”

  By then, some 291 regulars looked to Stieglitz as a kind of prophet, likening his vision of the new era to the liberal sentiments being voiced in response to recent events like the Triangle Shirtwaist fire and the repression of striking unionists. Of this time, Hutchins Hapgood recalled, “Much of the expression of those explosive days was the same, whether in art, literature, labor expansion, or sexual experience.” As critics were quick to point out, the 291 group were, in their way, “revolutionists.”

  Stieglitz believed that his mission was to teach Americans to seek vitality in art as in life. His vehicle in this crusade had been photography, but as the last twenty years had shown, not just any photography—the camera used as a means of liberation from outworn ways of “seeing.” Like other proselytizers, he was intolerant of nonbelievers, especially colleagues who failed to embrace the gospel laid out in Camera Work.

  A century later, it may seem exaggerated to invoke the language of religious zeal in this context. But we have only to think back to the next modernist campaign, the 1913 Armory Show, to grasp how deeply “the new spirit”—the show’s motto—disturbed those who preferred the status quo. In 1911, a new group, the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, formed to plan the vast International Exhibition of Modern Art, which has long been known for its site, the 69th Regiment Armory. After Arthur Davies, the group’s president, turned to Stieglitz for help, he agreed to lend works from his collection and urge his artists, Marin, Maurer, and Hartley, to take part. He also served as an honorary vice president, along with Renoir, Monet, Augustus John, and collectors like Isabella Stewart Gardner and Hapgood’s friend Mabel Dodge.

  In the meantime, Stieglitz devoted the gallery’s 1912 season to Dove’s pastels, Matisse’s sculpture and drawings, and a show of artwork by children, the first of its kind. Matisse still looked grotesque to most New Yorkers, and the thought that children might paint as well as the so-called moderns gave critics a field day. Yet the tide was beginning to turn. Praising 291—“this celebrated nursery of contemporary art”—the Times enthused, “Stieglitz’s courage, disinterestedness, and intelligence have placed New York almost abreast of Paris.”

  To emphasize their independence of mind, the Armory Show’s organizers chose as their emblem the pine tree of the American Revolutionary War flag, which appeared on posters, flyers, and campaign badges. In the weeks leading up to the opening, reporters rushed to interview Stieglitz as the only one, until then, to have shown Europe
’s “wild men.” Despite his misgivings about the size of the show, he urged New Yorkers to attend: “You will see there stranger things than you ever dreamed were on land or sea—and you’ll hear a battle cry of freedom.” He also offered advice to the bewildered: “Don’t adopt the enemy’s impudent device of plastering these emancipated artists and their work with labels….If a name is necessary in writing about these live ones, call them ‘Revitalizers.’ ”

  Alfred Stieglitz, photograph of Brancusi exhibition at 291, 1914

  When the show opened, it was clear that one man’s revitalizers could be another’s revolutionaries. Making their way through the American sculpture at the entrance, visitors noted the pine trees arranged around the hall. Most strolled along the central promenade, where French art hung in chronological order, as if leading inevitably to the controversial Gallery H, which gave pride of place to Matisse. (The distortions of Matisse’s Blue Nude often provoked viewers’ ire.) Turning left into Gallery I, they joined the mob in front of Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2—which soon became known as “an explosion in a shingle factory.” Since the layout made it impossible to return to the galleries where American paintings were hung, some felt that the Europeans were featured at the expense of artists like Maurer, Marin, Hartley, and Weber, whose work was in the outer rooms.

  To many, it seemed as if a bomb had dropped—as if American art had suddenly been made to seem insular. Stuart Davis, whose Ashcan-style watercolors recalled his illustrations for The Masses, compared the Big Show to “a masochistic reception whereat the native hosts are trampled and stomped by the European guests.” To others, its explosive charge was beneficial. “It set off a blast of dynamite in a cramped space—it blew everything wide open,” Kenneth Miller exulted to Rockwell Kent.

  Although photography had been excluded, the Big Show was a vindication for Stieglitz. “People are beginning to actually realize that something has happened,” he told a friend, “that ‘291’ is not only a ‘little exhibition room’ where ‘friends’ meet.” He planned several exhibitions to underscore his role in bringing modern art to New York. The first, just before the opening of the Armory Show, featured Marin’s watercolors, including recent cityscapes. The critics noted his lively treatment of Manhattan’s newest skyscraper, the Woolworth Building, which seemed to cavort in a variety of styles from representational to abstract.

  To Stieglitz, the next show, a retrospective of his work, would be a test of the medium’s standing as well as a summing up of his achievements. Haviland spoke for his mentor: “The period during…the International Exhibition at the Armory was deemed a proper one to show the relative place and value of photography. No better work for this purpose could have been chosen than that of Alfred Stieglitz. His prints represent the straightest kind of straight photography.”

  While Haviland did not say that some of the images shown were, in a way, self-portraits, he stressed Stieglitz’s choice of New York as his subject. Like Marin’s, Stieglitz’s cityscapes required an adjustment in perspective. Two Towers, New York (1911) showed Madison Square Garden and the Metropolitan Life Building (then the tallest in the world) behind the foreground of snow-covered streets where small figures struggle by. Such images read as “modern” through their emphasis on the skyline while playing with the city dweller’s sense of scale, which alters as he turns a corner.

  Having feared that his work might suffer by comparison with the Big Show, Stieglitz felt vindicated by the critics. His retrospective was “one of the significant events of the art season” (Samuel Swift, the Sun); his prints “unsurpassable” (Edgar Chamberlin, New York Mail). His status was secure, Royal Cortissoz wrote in the Tribune: “Visitors at the Armory, when they are studying Matisse and the rest, may well recall that it was in the Photo-Secession Gallery that so many of the ‘revolutionaries’ were first introduced….Mr. Stieglitz has been an exemplary pioneer.”

  His foreignness having been naturalized, Stieglitz could take his place among the right sort of revolutionaries—those deemed unassailably American.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Direct Expression of Today

  1914–1917

  By 1914, Stieglitz was no longer New York’s only champion of modern art. After the success of the Armory Show, others opened galleries to show new American artists. But unlike them, he saw art as a spiritual matter rather than as a commodity. It is at about this time that he decided to show those native artists in whom he believed—“because one’s own children must come first.”

  The outbreak of war in Europe that summer further unsettled Stieglitz’s thoughts about the links between art and culture. The country’s move toward a violently anti-German stance was hard for him to bear. “Colleagues tried to prove to me that Beethoven was no German,” he recalled; “that all the cruelty in the world came from Germany and that every Frenchman and Englishman was a saint. I was truly sick at heart.”

  That year, subscriptions to Camera Work declined, and some supporters distanced themselves. To reassure himself that his struggles had been worthwhile, Stieglitz planned a special issue of the magazine on the question “What is ‘291’?” That fall, he told Caffin that he would seek answers from “twenty or thirty people, men and women, of different walks of life, from different parts of the country, some in Europe.”

  Steichen returned from France in November, to find the gallery in the doldrums despite a groundbreaking display of African carvings. The wall coverings were dusty, he noted: “There was a dust-covered atmosphere about the whole place.” Stieglitz agreed to let him brighten it up with colored papers in abstract shapes as a backdrop for the sculptures. But Steichen was sure that with a war on, there would be little support for the arts. Moreover, he and Stieglitz no longer saw eye-to-eye. Steichen wanted to start a new, forward-looking arts organization, but Stieglitz was focused on the past, as demonstrated by the special issue of Camera Work.

  Stieglitz published all sixty-eight of the replies he received without comment in January 1915. The financier Eugene Meyer (who had married Agnes Ernst) repeated what many had said before: 291 was “an oasis of real freedom.” Man Ray, a frequent caller, said of the gallery, “A personality lives through it all.” To Hodge Kirnon, the elevator man, 291 inspired “those who were daring enough to be intrepid.” But not all replies were admiring. One critic said that some exhibitions amounted to “a tearing down of the old faith…without substituting anything in its place.”

  The most challenging response came from Steichen. In his view, the gallery was marking time: The special issue of Camera Work was a way of avoiding engagement with the European conflict. Yet if 291, in the person of its “despot,” would accept “the necessity of making of itself a vast force instead of a local one,” it might still choose to pursue a civilizing mission rather than a local one.

  Others close to Stieglitz also believed that 291 was in a rut. Haviland, de Zayas, and Agnes Meyer hoped to revive the spirit of Camera Work in a new magazine, to be called—in Alfred’s honor—291. In its pages they would deploy the latest experiments in design to champion the aesthetic that he had introduced to the world, an approach that would soon be known as New York Dada. De Zayas would run the gallery, Francis Picabia, who was spending the war years in New York, would be an adviser, Agnes Meyer a major supporter, and Katharine Rhoades, the statuesque artist whose work Stieglitz was showing at 291, would help with the layout. He agreed to the plan, though it was not the sort of engagement proposed by Steichen.

  After the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, the strain between the two men deepened. Steichen argued for intervention in support of France, while Stieglitz insisted that the United States should stay out of the war. “Close friends seemed to fall by the wayside,” he recalled. “I could not turn 291 into a political institution….The work going on at the gallery, I felt, was universal.” Steichen did not, but he accepted the truce that allowed 291 to keep going.

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  “What are nations but a series of families,” Stieglitz asked a friend at this time. “Is there not this constant war: this desire to destroy: brother and brother, father and son, husband and wife, etc., etc.” Rather than “gas[s]ing” about ideals, people should look to themselves. He did not, however, take his own advice. Quarrels with Emmy over the importance of his pursuits and the triviality of hers, as he saw them, made him feel trapped. For some time, he had been indulging in a flirtation with Rhoades, taking her portrait, writing to her in secret, and publishing her poetry in the July 1914 issue of Camera Work (where it suffered by comparison with that of Mina Loy).

  In the new year, he grew despondent over what he saw as the defection of his entourage. Haviland’s family summoned him to France; a so-called homage to Stieglitz in 291 contained a sharp critique; Agnes Meyer announced plans for an exhibition space ten blocks north of his own, to be called the Modern Gallery. He accepted the fait accompli but brooded about his desertion by his allies. Still, Stieglitz and Steichen continued to work together despite their differences. “Disagreement seemed to enhance rather than diminish their personal regard for each other in those years,” Steichen’s biographer writes. The strains in their private lives brought them closer when Steichen’s wife left him. Both called on Stieglitz as their confessor; the Stieglitz clan offered support. It was a distressing time, Stieglitz told the same friend to whom he had posed his earlier questions: “Tragedies are happening, or about to happen, unpreventable ones.”

  One of the few bright spots for Stieglitz that year was his meeting with Paul Strand. A sporadic visitor to the gallery, Strand showed Stieglitz his portfolio in the winter of 1915. After looking closely at the young man’s prints, Stieglitz gave him what Strand called “the best criticism that I have ever had from anybody.” Examining his pictorialist print of a summer house (Bay Shore, Long Island, New York), Stieglitz said that the soft-focus lens brought everything together “in a kind of agreeable blur.” But it also made each part of the picture look the same: “Grass looks like water; water looks like it has the same quality as the bark of the tree; and you’ve lost all the elements that distinguish one form…from another.”