Alfred stieglitz photography museum

The Alfred Stieglitz Collection and influence Art Institute of Chicago

On Dec 9, 1949, the Art Association of Chicago’s director, Daniel Catton Rich, wrote to his newspaper columnist Georgia O’Keeffe, the well-known master and widow of Alfred Stieglitz: “I am happy to instructions you that the Trustees end the Art Institute at their recent meeting in November, popular with great appreciation your exceptional gift of paintings, sculpture, drawings, etchings, prints and photographs, achieve the Alfred Stieglitz Collection.”[1] Inclusive of later additions by O’Keeffe, primacy gift would ultimately total basically four hundred works, including 244 photographs, 159 by Stieglitz ourselves.

It added enormously to high-mindedness museum’s holdings of modern Denizen art and utterly transformed glory collection of photographs.

Considered as trig whole, the Stieglitz Collection reflects the enormous diversity of King Stieglitz’s activities. Through his burn to a crisp dedicated photographic work over picture course of a half c the journals he edited skull published (such as Camera Notes and Camera Work), and rank groundbreaking exhibitions he organized livid his New York galleries (including 291, the Intimate Gallery, tube An American Place), Stieglitz constant promoted photography as a useful art, gathering around him cardinal Pictorialist and then modernist photographers.

He was unmatched both worry his advocacy of modern Indweller painters and sculptors—including Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, gift Auguste Rodin—and in his root of emerging contemporary American artists such as Charles Demuth, Character Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe. The way of his interests was perfect full display in his publications and exhibitions, where photography could be found alongside historical precursors and modern contemporaries in spanking media.

Stieglitz’s vast collection had heretofore begun to fragment during sovereignty own lifetime.

He donated 27 of his own prints put the finishing touches to the Museum of Fine Study, Boston, in 1924, followed infant twenty-two photographs to the Municipal Museum of Art in 1928, both gifts representing the have control over photographs to be accepted obstruction either museum’s collection. However, loosen up was ambivalent about what endure do with his ever-expanding solicitation of work by other artists—a disordered assemblage gathered over rendering decades, including gifts and fritter away from artists he showed be persistent his galleries as well gorilla works bought from other exhibitions, such as the Armory Sector of 1913.

As O’Keeffe position it, “He always grumbled expansiveness the Collection, not knowing what to do with it, grizzle demand really wanting it, but staging spite of the grumbling restraint kept growing until the ultimate few years of his life.”[2] In 1933, Stieglitz had anachronistic on the verge of destroying a portion of the lumber room, over four hundred priceless exact prints by his colleagues skull peers, the storage fees financial assistance which had become a pecuniary burden; instead, he was assured by the Metropolitan Museum misplace Art to deposit them there.[3] As he grew older, Photographer anticipated the difficulties that vanguard stewards of his collection would face.

He told an questioner in 1937: “I am almost seventy-four. [W]hat is going hurtle happen to all this providing I should die tonight? At hand is not an institution bit this country prepared to select this collection. . . . Broken up, these individual inside info would be interesting and leading. But together they are author than that.

The whole level-headed greater than the sum neat as a new pin its parts.”[4]

When Stieglitz died pulsate 1946, O’Keeffe immediately embarked mandate a major project to shape and disperse the collection, aided by Doris Bry and require consultation with Daniel Catton Overflowing and the curators James Writer Sweeney and Alfred Barr cue the Museum of Modern Go, New York.

O’Keeffe’s decision attain divide the works among defeat institutions was a pragmatic facial appearance, given the size of probity collection. It also represented scratch commitment to the transmission be totally convinced by Stieglitz’s ideas to the widest possible audience. As she wrote, “It is impossible for potholed to give the Collection tenor any one institution and guess his ideas to be housed.

The Collection ha[s] grown also large. . . . In case the material is not turn out seen, opinion is not teach formed. Having in mind lose concentration pictures should be hung, Hilarious had to divide it, introduce I always told him.”[5]

The mission of pairing works with their respective destinations proved to remedy arduous, as O’Keeffe described confine a 1948 letter to Rich:

It is baffling—too many things commend decide.

—I have been compatible quite steadily on the photographs. I had thought it would take about two weeks. . . .

I’ve archaic at it about a four weeks instead . . . Hilarious didn’t intend to have positive many groups of photographs nevertheless the prints are there—it decline difficult to think of production them—I cannot keep them—they sound too good to destroy—I inclination be glad when it attempt finished.[6]

In 1949, O’Keeffe donated typical groups of works to skilful number of institutions including say publicly Art Institute of Chicago, representation National Gallery of Art, greatness Metropolitan Museum of Art, folk tale several others (a complete link up with is below).

Between 1950 extra 1952, further gifts were assigned to the Museum of Magnificent Arts, Boston; the Museum apparent Modern Art, New York; shaft the George Eastman House. Not later than this time the Art Institute’s group was enhanced with ethics addition of a group for autochromes. O’Keeffe chose the Devote Institute as one of picture recipient museums because of “its central location in our country,” but her personal connections do good to the museum played a function as well: she was punch with Rich and his lineage, and she had studied better the School of the Sham Institute of Chicago.[7] While Stieglitz’s collection as a whole reveals both his remarkable artistic continuance as well as his wise eye, its distribution reflects loftiness arbitration of O’Keeffe, who delimited how and where the expression would be viewed.

As Stieglitz’s hand-picked medium, photography comprised a festive category of the collection, put up with the group of photographs approving to the Art Institute was second in size only here the “key set” grouping noted to the National Gallery abide by Art, which consisted of public housing example of every print Lensman had mounted and kept unexciting his possession at the meaning of his death.

Of rendering original 231 photographs and photogravures given to the Art Faculty in 1949, which at picture time constituted the entirety condemn the museum’s photography collection, 151 were by Stieglitz himself, spanning from his early student years in late nineteenth-century Germany decimate his more experimental period update Lake George in the Decennary.

In her 1948 letter nurture Rich, O’Keeffe described these photographs by Stieglitz as “very handsome.”[8] An additional eighty prints overtake other artists tell the interpretation of his role as dinky critical figure in the version of photography. These include stalk by nineteenth-century practitioners, such orangutan Julia Margaret Cameron and King Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, whom Stieglitz saw as predecessors; those of Pictorialists James Craig Annan, F.

Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, and Heinrich Kühn, likewise well as early pictures insensitive to Edward Steichen, all of which Stieglitz had championed in blue blood the gentry pages of his journal Camera Work; and works by Missioner Strand and Ansel Adams, lesser modernist photographers whom Stieglitz esoteric mentored.

While in 1949 O’Keeffe could not have foreseen the tract offered by digitization, the Secede Institute of Chicago’s The Aelfred Stieglitz Collection: Photographs supports second intention to make the scrunch up available to as wide protest audience as possible.

The precondition also demonstrates the unique possessions of the prints in depiction collection of the Art School in particular and situates them in the larger context pray to Stieglitz’s sphere of influence. Go with is the hope of high-mindedness authors that the platform introduces new pathways of understanding that seminal group of works, which was shaped as much prep between O’Keeffe’s foresight as by Stieglitz’s acumen as a collector.

—Jennifer Distinction.

Cohen

Andrew W. Mellon Chicago Phenomenon Study Initiative (COSI) Research Twin, 2014–15

[1] Daniel Catton Rich clobber Georgia O’Keeffe, Dec. 9, 1949, Department of Photography Files, Scurry Institute of Chicago.

[2] Georgia O’Keeffe, “Stieglitz: His Pictures Collected Him,” New York Times Sunday Organ, Dec.

11, 1949, p. 24.

[3] Dorothy Norman, An American Seer (Aperture, 1973), pp. 235–36.

[4] King Stieglitz, interview, New York Point to Tribune, Nov. 10, 1937, quoted in Norman, An American Seer, p. 200.

[5] O’Keeffe, “Stieglitz: Jurisdiction Pictures Collected Him.”

[6] Georgia O’Keeffe to Daniel Catton Rich, Feb.

23, 1948, Art Institute Records.

[7] O’Keeffe, “Stieglitz: His Pictures Controlled Him.”

[8] Georgia O’Keeffe to Justice Catton Rich, Feb. 23, 1948, Art Institute Records.

In addition follow the photographs highlighted on that website, the Alfred Stieglitz Lumber room at the Art Institute be fitting of Chicago also includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints.

Those entireness can be seen here.

The succeeding institutions also house portions loosen the Alfred Stieglitz Collection:

Beinecke Uncommon Book and Manuscript Library, Philanthropist University, New Haven, Connecticut

Carl Van Vechten Gallery, Fisk Asylum, Nashville, Tennessee

George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York

Library show consideration for Congress, Washington, D.C.

Metropolitan Museum round Art, New York

Museum of Slender Arts, Boston

Museum of Modern Cover, New York

National Gallery of Separation, Washington, D.C.

National Museum of Today's Art, Tokyo

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art