The Collection Of Alfred Stieglitz

Collects the private correspondence between Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, revealing the ups and downs of their marriage, their thoughts on their work, and their friendships with other artists.

In this book [the author] draws upon her close association with Stieglitz and upon his own words to create a warm portrait of the focal figure of the modern art movement in America. The many direct quotations preserve in written form the bold, subtle nature of Stieglitz's speech and the brilliance of his parables and anecdotes. The 80 reproductions of Stieglitz's photographs constitute the largest selection ever published. Many are reproduced here for the first time. They powerfully attest to the purity of his vision. Ninety illustrations of a documentary nature, including additional Stieglitz photographs and work by artists he showed, are also reproduced--Jacket.

A fascinating biography of a revolutionary American artist ripe for rediscovery as a photographer and champion of other artists Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was an enormously influential artist and nurturer of artists even though his accomplishments are often overshadowed by his role as Georgia O’Keeffe’s husband. This new book from celebrated biographer Phyllis Rose reconsiders Stieglitz as a revolutionary force in the history of American art. Born in New Jersey, Stieglitz at age eighteen went to study in Germany, where his father, a wool merchant and painter, insisted he would get a proper education. After returning to America, he became one of the first American photographers to achieve international fame. By the time he was sixty, he gave up photography and devoted himself to selling and promoting art. His first gallery, 291, was the first American gallery to show works by Picasso, Rodin, Matisse, and other great European modernists. His galleries were not dealerships so much as open universities, where he introduced European modern art to Americans and nurtured an appreciation of American art among American artists.

Essay by John Szarkowski.

A master photographer, Alfred Stieglitz was also a visionary promoter and avid collector of modern American and European art from the first half of the 20th century. This book is the first fully-illustrated catalogue of works in the unparalleled 'Alfred Stieglitz Collection', which was given to the Metropolitan Museum after Stieglitz's death.

When, in 1907, Alfred Stieglitz took a simple picture of passengers on a ship bound for Europe, he could not have known that The Steerage, as it was soon called, would become a modernist icon and, from today’s vantage, arguably the most famous photograph made by an American photographer. In complementary essays, a photo historian and a photographer reassess this important picture, rediscovering the complex social and aesthetic ideas that informed it and explaining how over the years it has achieved its status as a masterpiece. What aspects of Stieglitz’s ideas and sometimes-murky ambitions help us understand the picture’s achievements? How should we assess the photograph in relation to Stieglitz’s many writings about it? The authors of this book explore what The Steerage might mean in at least two senses—by itself, as a grand and self-sufficient work, and also ineluctably bound up with the many stories told about it. They make the photograph, today, what Stieglitz himself made it over the years—a photo-text work.

“Creative Composites provides an intelligent, rigorous account of several under-examined figures who gathered around the photographer Alfred Stieglitz and played important roles in the first American avant-garde. Drawing on rich archival sources, Lauren Kroiz revisits the cultural debates of the period and constructs an intricate and convincing comparative analysis of the role that gender, race and ethnicity, and cultural nationalism played in the construction of American modernism. This important historical and interpretive text represents a much-needed contribution not only to the history of American art but also to American social and cultural history.”—Marcia Brennan, author of Curating Consciousness: Mysticism and the Modern Museum “Describing the associations between immigrant critics and artists enmeshed in the New York art world in the early twentieth century, Kroiz skillfully demonstrates that American modernism reached beyond its European influences and was a deeply hybrid enterprise with multiple, global, and overlapping roots. Kroiz is sure-footed when seriously addressing works of art and marvelous at working through the issues around the ethnic identities of many of the key figures. Illuminating a crucial and oft-overlooked aspect of the history of American modernism—this peripatetic and shifting multiculturalism—Creative Composites is a timely, deeply researched text that highlights the wealth of mixed ancestry in our cultural heritage.”—Jessica May, author of American Modern: Documentary Photography by Abbott, Evans, and Bourke-White

Many of the early twentieth century's finest examples of photography and modernist art reached their widest audience in the fifty issues of Camera Work, edited and published by the legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz from 1903 to 1917. The lavishly illustrated periodical established photography as a fine art, and brought a new sensibility to the American art world. This volume reproduces chronologically all the photographs and other illustrations (except for advertisements) that ever appeared in the publication. Included here are some of the finest and best-known works by American and European artists and photographers, including numerous photos by Stieglitz himself as well as Edward (as Eduard) Steichen, Paul Strand, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Clarence White, Robert Demachy, Frank Eugene, Julia Margaret Cameron, Gertrude Käsebier, Heinrich Kühn, and many others. Paintings, drawings, and sculpture by Van Gogh, Cézanne, Mary Cassatt, Picasso, Matisse, John Marin, Rodin, Brancusi, and Nadelman—to name just a famous few—appear here as well. Marianne Fulton Margolis provided an extensive historical Introduction about Stieglitz and the magazine and prepared three complete Indexes of the pictures, by title, artist, and sitter. Painstakingly accurate and complete, Camera Work is an indispensable reference for an outstanding period in the history of photography and art.