STIEGLITZ, ALFRED

born Jan. 1, 1864, Hoboken, N.J., U.S. died July 13, 1946, New York City American photographer, passionate advocate of photography as an art, and a pioneer exhibitor of modern art in the United States. In 1902 he founded the seminal Photo-Secession Group as a protest against the conventional photography of the time. Stieglitz' own best photographs are the 400-print series of his wife, Georgia O'Keeffe, and his studies of cloud patterns suggesting emotions. Stieglitz was the oldest son of Edward Stieglitz, a retired woollen merchant. After his early schooling in New York, the Stieglitz family moved to Europe in 1881 to further their children's education. Stieglitz eventually registered for studies in mechanical engineering at the Berlin Polytechnic in 1883. A few months later, the purchase of a small camera led him to abandon engineering for photo-chemistry and to begin his photographic career. While still a student at Berlin, where many of his friends were painters, Stieglitz decided to fight for the recognition of photography as a creative art medium equal to that of painting. The best way to gain this acceptance, he innocently believed, was to become a photographic authority, and to become such an authority he believed he had only to set the highest standards for his own prints and to win all possible prizes and medals. Both in Europe and the United States, where he returned to live in 1890, his early work (c. 18831910) reflects these aims. It was characterized by constant technical innovations, which at the time were believed impossible to achieve. Before the turn of the century, for example, Stieglitz had made the first successful photographs in snow, in rain, and at night and had undertaken the first serious use of a small, hand-held camera. By 1910 these photographs had won many important prizes. Realizing that his own early fame could not alone bring about the recognition of photography as an art, Stieglitz believed that the work of a group might be more effective than that of an individual. After several ventures with established photographic organizations, in which Stieglitz usually led dissident factions, in 1902 he founded a new group of his own, the Photo-Secession, a title adapted from the German Secessionist painters who at that time also were in revolt against the traditional art world. As its leader, Stieglitz gathered around him a group of talented American photographers dedicated to his ideals. Until 1905, however, the Photo-Secession had not had a centre to exhibit its work in. That year, largely at the urging of Edward Steichen, a close friend and associate, Stieglitz finally agreed that the group should have its own space. Initially called the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, located in New York City, the group soon became known by the gallery's street number (291); and Stieglitz himself was so closely identified with its work that he often signed his personal correspondence 291. Soon after its establishment Stieglitz turned his energies to the cause of modern art. At first he did not claim to understand the modern movements, but he did consider them to be fascinating new ways of expressing reality. The famous Armory Show of 1913 is often considered to have introduced modern art to the United States. Stieglitz in 1908, however, had already held the first showings of work by the sculptor Auguste Rodin and the painter Henri Matisse, and he continued to hold exhibitions of the painters Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau, Paul Czanne, and Pablo Picasso during the five years before the Armory Show. Even more revolutionary was Stieglitz' fervent belief that living American artists were of equal importance and could create significant works of art in their own lifetime. Thus, during the same years that he was bringing modern European art to the United States, he also was holding exhibitions of the work of the American painters John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Alfred Maurer, and Max Weber. By the time 291 closed in 1917, Stieglitz also had given Americans their first shows of works by the sculptors Constantin Brancusi and Elie Nadelman and the painters Francis Picabia, Gino Severini, Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and Georgia O'Keeffe, who was to become his wife in 1924. For the most part these exhibitions were viewed by a hostile and derisive public. The history of these stormy years is documented in Camera Work (190317), the radical and beautiful magazine edited and published by Stieglitz. Neither 291 nor Camera Work survived the difficulties of the World War I years, both coming to an end in 1917. With the closing of the gallery, Stieglitz once more had time for his own photography, neglected during the years of 291. His interests turned from his youthful preoccupation with technique and a wide subject matter to an intense preoccupation with what he saw and lived with dailyeither at his summer home in Lake George, N.Y., or at his New York City residence. Two series of this period (191737), each consisting of more than 400 prints, are often considered his greatest photographs; the portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe, and the equivalentsphotographs of abstract cloud shapes corresponding to all possible emotional experiences. In both he continued to extend the frontiers of photography. Stieglitz' preoccupation with his photography did not deter him from continuing to hold shows of American painters, thus helping to provide them a living and the freedom to work as they wished. Since by that time the once-ridiculed European artists had become a commercial success, he ceased working for them. (He was not a dealer and never profited financially from his activities for artists.) Fanatic until the end in his belief that significant art existed in the United States, his steadfast interest encouraged a group of American artists (principally Charles Demuth, Dove, Hartley, Marin, and O'Keeffe) to achieve this vision. His faith was demonstrated in more than 175 exhibitions held in his three galleries (190546), first at 291 (190517), then at the Intimate Gallery (192529), and finally at An American Place (192946). By the end of his life he had changed the climate for all American painting, gaining for it a truly independent status and acceptance. Stieglitz broke down the barriers against photography in American art museums. His prints were the first photographs accepted as art and received as such by major museums in Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. In those museums his photographs were hung and exhibited in the same manner as other notable achievements in the graphic arts. A born leader, Stieglitz had an infallible eye, a flexible, inquiring mind, and a temperament conducive to battling for his revolutionary beliefs. Almost single-handedly, he launched his country into the 20th-century art world, not only in the field of photography but in painting and sculpture as well. He awakened the public by exposing it, for the first time, to the best of modern art. With camera and pen, with fiery harangues in his own galleries, he goaded Americans away from their complacent artistic tradition, which largely had been confined to the imitation of European academicians since the 19th century, and worked for the recognition of the contemporary artist in the United States as a force in the international art world. Doris Bry Additional reading The most complete set of Stieglitz photographs is held by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Other important collections are those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; and the San Francisco Museum of Art. The main portions of the Alfred Stieglitz collection of paintings are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago. Weston J. Naef (ed.), Collection of Alfred Stieglitz (1978), contains reproductions of most of the approximately 600 photographs in the collection donated by Stieglitz to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The text of this first major book on the Stieglitz collection provides much useful background and bibliographical information. Other significant works include Doris Bry, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographer (1965); Herbert J. Seligmann, Alfred Stieglitz Talking (1966); and Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz; an American Seer (1973), a comprehensive survey of his work and influence.