Essentials: Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand at The Met

When you talk about Classical music, you often begin with the three Killer B’s: Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. If you talk about American photography, you need to begin with the Essential S’s: Stieglitz, Steichen, and Strand. Malcolm Daniel’s Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand: Masterworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the catalog to the exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 10, 2011, provides the perfect primer to these essential artists who saw photography through its infancy as a fine art and helped find it a place in the pantheon, as symbolized by their acceptance into The Met’s collection. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Essentials."

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of Malcolm Daniel’s Stieglitz, Steichen, Strand: Masterworks from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the catalog to the exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through April 10, 2011.]

Root Canal: “Prendergast in Italy” at the MFA Houston

In 1882, American novelist Henry James concluded that there was “nothing more to be said” about Venice, Italy. Artists of all stripes had trod and sloshed through the streets and canals so long that opportunities for saying something new had, he felt, dried up entirely. Yet, in 1900, Maurice Prendergast exhibited a series of watercolors painted of Venice that made a giant splash in the American art world and cleared a path for a new wave of American modernism. Prendergast in Italy, an exhibition at the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, brings together these watery landmarks to recreate a seminal moment in American modern art and to rescue a great artist from drowning in the depths of obscurity. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Root Canal."

[Image: Maurice Prendergast, American, 1858-1924. The Grand Canal, Venice, c. 1898-99. Watercolor and pencil on paper. Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago, Illinois, Daniel J. Terra Collection, 1999.123.]

[Many thanks to the Museum of Fine Art, Houston for providing me with the image above and other press materials for Prendergast in Italy. Many thanks also to Merrell Publishers for providing me with a copy of the catalogue.]

Abstract Thoughts: “Georgia O’Keeffe: Abstraction” at the Phillips Collection

"I had to create an equivalent for what I felt about what I was looking at,” Georgia O’Keeffe once said of her abstract works, “not copy it." Famous for her images of flowers, shells, animal bones, and other recognizable objects, O’Keeffe also ventured into the world of abstraction, often pushing the envelope of representation beyond the identifiable but still remaining tethered, however distantly, to the real world. Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction at the Phillips Collection explores just how undervalued O’Keeffe still is today as a groundbreaking figure in American abstract art. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Abstract Thoughts."

[Image: Georgia O’Keeffe, Music, Pink and Blue No. 2, 1918. Oil on canvas, 35 x 29 1/8 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Emily Fisher Landau in honor of Tom Armstrong, 91.90 (CR 258). © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins]



[Many thanks to the Phillips Collection for providing me with the image above and for a review copy of the catalogue to the exhibition Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction, which runs through May 9, 2010.]

Four Questions for… Elizabeth Kennedy

In The Eight and American Modernisms (my review here), Elizabeth Kennedy, Curator of Collection at the Terra Foundation for American Art, tries to reposition The Eight within the history of American modern art. Along with her fellow essayists, Dr. Kennedy tries to toss the terms “The Ashcan School” onto the dustbin of art history for good. Dr. Kennedy also graciously agreed to answer a few questions regarding The Eight for a new feature at Art Blog By Bob, Four Questions for…

ABBB: In The Eight and American Modernisms, you go out of your way to minimize the use of the term “Ashcan School.” I’m as guilty as anyone of using the two labels synonymously. Do you think that the “Ashcan School” label deserves a full retirement?

Dr. Kennedy: Since the catchy phrase “Ashcan School” was coined in 1934, it has caused much mischief in coming to terms with the painterly qualities of The Eight’s body of work as well as veiling the importance of them as early American modernists. The journalistic and commercial endeavors of the Philadelphia Four (Glackens, Luks, Shinn and Sloan), however, are somewhat connected to the concept of “realistic” portraying street life. The true connection to the term is Sloan’s 1905 etchings series of New York, which depict scenes that are alternatives to American academic artists’ genteel subjects.

For me, it is the careless mixing art and politics that is implied in the term “Ashcan,” invented during the Great Depression, which does a disservice to these artists’ ambitions to be “modern painters of one kind or another.” As early as 1907 Henri touted their differences (therefore, no school), and Sloan, until his death in the 1950s, disputed any political agenda for myself, who was at one time a socialist and a cartoonist for The Masses, or the other artists. In summary, there was no “social or political” agenda attached to these artists’ works of art.

ABBB: You chose Robert Henri’s Betalo Nude (1916) for the cover of The Eight and American Modernisms, which earned me several offended (and several lingering) stares while reading it on my commute. Do you feel that The Eight’s approach to the nude positions them closer to European modernism? If so, does that make them less “American”?

Dr. Kennedy: The human form is at the center of the western art tradition. The plethora of nude females pictured in US art after the 1860s continues until today. Art historian Kenneth Clark’s celebrated The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1972) makes the distinction between the “nude” and the “naked” model, which is an important difference to make for American art in the first decades of the 20th century. If the female nude form was idealized, then it could be accepted as a work of art; a realistic portrayal was problematic. While at the turn of the century, paintings of female nudes were found in American art exhibitions, but they were not as frequent as the French salons.

20th century avant-guard European art distorted the body—in color by Fauvist artists or in shape by cubists. Henri achieved his own ideas through the use of theories and inspiration—with no need to impose a national identity. The Betalo Nude is gorgeous because of the color harmonies used to create a shape that happens to be a body. Of course, a natural fission arises from viewing nudity but there are other paintings of nude women that do not have the same impact. Henri’s created an exceptional painting because if its color and composition.

ABBB: As The Eight and American Modernisms shows, the styles and personalities of the artists falling under that banner differ greatly. Is there one artist who stands out from the rest for you personally?

Dr. Kennedy: My favorite member of The Eight is Maurice Prendergast because of his willingness to explore unconventional ideas and, yet, when he found his original style that expressed his creativity he remained focused on his mission. His story is inspiring because eventually others, the important modern art collectors and artists, realized his brilliance. Nevertheless, he is an underappreciated modernist because he did not “fit the Ashcan” label nor did he preach a “mantra of modernism” in the style of Alfred Stieglitz or Thomas Hart Benton. Prendergast arose each morning and went to his studio to work and left behind some of the most beautiful paintings ever made.

ABBB: When The Eight whittled their number down to eight, they left Jerome Myers and George Bellows most notably outside the fold. Like the legendary “Fifth Beatle,” who would you nominate for the “Ninth” Eight? Are there any women candidates for the position?

Dr. Kennedy: If there had been a 9th artist, it should have been Herni’s protégée George Bellows. Bellows was an exceptionally inventive painter, whose brightly colored palette of men at work upset the “Ashcan” label—nothing gloomy about these New York streets. Bellows’ later portraits and nudes are equally exceptional for their technique and inventiveness. His work before his untimely death was verging on the surreal.

[Many thanks to Dr. Kennedy for her gracious and thoughtful answers.]

Photo Succession

Pioneering photographer Alfred Stieglitz justly gets credit for first exposing many of the great European artists of the turn of the twentieth century to America by exhibiting them in his Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later know more simply by its street number—291. Cezanne, Matisse, Picasso, Rodin, and others can trace their influence on American art to exhibitions at 291. What many people forget, however, is that another pioneering photographer, Edward Steichen, introduced those artists to Stieglitz. If Stieglitz gave birth to modernism in America, then Steichen played the midwife. Born March 27, 1879 in Luxembourg, Steichen came to America at the age of two and became a naturalized citizen. For the young Steichen, photography was just one of the arts that intrigued him. The very art of photography at that time still tried to play by the rules of painting rather than boldly create a visual language uniquely suited to itself as a medium. Steichen’s 1902 Self-Portrait with Brush and Palette (above) shows just how enslaved Steichen remained to painterly convention, identifying himself in this self-portrait as a painter through the medium of photography. Steichen’s painterly eye, however, served him well in creating his own vision while capturing the essence of the visions of others.

The paradox of Steichen’s portrait of Rodin, also known as “The Thinker” (above, from 1902), is that you can see almost nothing of Rodin’s face but you still get a sense of the deep thoughts of the man. Despite the hazy, almost Impressionist atmosphere, Steichen conveys the clarity of Rodin’s art and its basis in deep thinking about the human condition before fashioning it in sculpture. Just as he chose to portray himself with brush and palette in his self-portrait, Steichen shows Rodin with one of his sculptures. The man and his work are inseparably linked. Sadly, the link between Steichen and Stieglitz shattered over philosophical differences pertaining to the mission of 291. Steichen began working in a more commercial vein, creating iconic portraits of Greta Garbo and other celebrities that went beyond glitz and attempted to capture the psychological truth of the sitter. Stieglitz continued to pursue the painterly style they had shared while Steichen evolved and looked for new directions in photography.

Steichen served as a documentary photographer in both World War I and World War II. In 1947, Steichen essentially retired as a working photographer to become the Director of Photography at the MoMA, establishing the preeminent photographic collection in America. The MoMA’s Department of Photography is today named in Steichen’s honor. In 1955, Steichen curated an exhibition of more than five hundred photos from sixty-eight countries titled The Family of Man. After seeing two world wars, Steichen sought to unite the world through photography, the most democratic of art forms technologically. At heart, Steichen always remained a painter, and a lover of painters. Steichen’s Henri Matisse and “The Serpentine” (above, from 1909) oddly shows Matisse with sculpting rather than painting, but Steichen knew Matisse well enough to know that Matisse’s sculpture informed his painting and gave it its soul. In many ways painting gave Steichen’s photography its soul, too, even after he put aside brush and palette.

Heights and Depths

I’d love to know what percentage of art-related calendars consist of the art of Norman Rockwell, Thomas Kinkade, and Ansel Adams. The number has to be staggering. Born February 20, 1902, Ansel Adams has become over the years the comfortable-as-an-easy-chair photographer of choice for many Americans the same way that Rockwell has become synonymous with Americana and Kinkade with kitsch. Images such as Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (above, from 1941) simply take your breath away with their composition and beauty. Black and white photography never seems archaic in Adams’ hands. The tonalities just leap out at you. Adams also had the ability to frame an image in such a way that it seemed unfamiliar yet recognizable—just changed enough to make you look at it with fresh eyes. Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico could almost serve as a pendant to the “Earthrise” photo taken by astronaut William Anders of the Apollo 8 mission that landed on the moon.

Unlike Alfred Stieglitz, Adams never resorted to distorting tricks to make his photographs more painterly, which was the ideal of much early photography. Instead, Adams pushed the technical limitations of photography to the brink ,experimenting with sharpened focus, increased contrast, different rates of exposure, different types of paper, and other darkroom magic to achieve realer-than-real images such as Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California (above, from 1944). Adams helped further photography as a medium when he founded with Edward Weston the Group f/64, which eventually became the photography department of the MoMA. Thanks to Adams’ efforts, photography grew from a poor cousin to painting and the other accepted fine arts to a medium on equal standing. Adams’ work also preserved much of the natural beauty of the American west, particularly that of Yosemite National Park. Sadly, much of the actual land has been altered by climate changes, but at least we have Adams’ photographs to remind us of what once was and what we have lost.



Other photographers, particularly Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange, are associated with the social injustices of the first half of the twentieth century in American, but Adams also belongs in that circle. When the U.S. government detained Japanese-Americans in camps after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Adams felt compelled to fight back with his camera. Adams visited the Manzanar War Relocation Center and took a series of photographs to demonstrate that these Japanese-Americans were “real” Americans, too. Adams faced heavy opposition (even Theodore Geisel, the future Dr. Seuss, drew cartoons questioning the loyalty of the Japanese-Americans), but he hoped that photographs such as Manzanar Baseball (above, from 1943) would change minds in a “See, they play baseball, too!” kind of way. Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans, the book that came out of this project, remains an almost-forgotten chapter of Adams career and certainly one that will never make it to the calendars. As with Norman Rockwell, we have grown too familiar with Ansel Adams and think we know him, but Adams has depths that we too often lose in his mountains.