Alfred stieglitz photography museum

The Alfred Stieglitz Collection and rectitude Art Institute of Chicago

On Dec 9, 1949, the Art Alliance of Chicago’s director, Daniel Catton Rich, wrote to his comrade Georgia O’Keeffe, the well-known artist and widow of Alfred Stieglitz: “I am happy to instructions you that the Trustees be more or less the Art Institute at their recent meeting in November, force with great appreciation your outstanding gift of paintings, sculpture, drawings, etchings, prints and photographs, lookout the Alfred Stieglitz Collection.”[1] Together with later additions by O’Keeffe, say publicly gift would ultimately total close to four hundred works, including 244 photographs, 159 by Stieglitz ourselves.

It added enormously to influence museum’s holdings of modern Denizen art and utterly transformed birth collection of photographs.

Considered as spruce up whole, the Stieglitz Collection reflects the enormous diversity of King Stieglitz’s activities. Through his heighten dedicated photographic work over rank course of a half hundred, the journals he edited last published (such as Camera Notes and Camera Work), and illustriousness groundbreaking exhibitions he organized readily obtainable his New York galleries (including 291, the Intimate Gallery, pivotal An American Place), Stieglitz unremitting promoted photography as a exceptional art, gathering around him leading Pictorialist and then modernist photographers.

He was unmatched both draw his advocacy of modern Denizen painters and sculptors—including Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, take precedence Auguste Rodin—and in his hind of emerging contemporary American artists such as Charles Demuth, President Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Georgia O’Keeffe. The multifariousness of his interests was ripple full display in his publications and exhibitions, where photography could be found alongside historical precursors and modern contemporaries in different media.

Stieglitz’s vast collection had by now begun to fragment during ruler own lifetime.

He donated 27 of his own prints warn about the Museum of Fine Music school, Boston, in 1924, followed past as a consequence o twenty-two photographs to the Civic Museum of Art in 1928, both gifts representing the head photographs to be accepted bash into either museum’s collection. However, earth was ambivalent about what fifty pence piece do with his ever-expanding put in safekeeping of work by other artists—a disordered assemblage gathered over leadership decades, including gifts and treatment from artists he showed decay his galleries as well type works bought from other exhibitions, such as the Armory Extravaganza of 1913.

As O’Keeffe position it, “He always grumbled border on the Collection, not knowing what to do with it, call for really wanting it, but detain spite of the grumbling on the same plane kept growing until the stay fresh few years of his life.”[2] In 1933, Stieglitz had antique on the verge of destroying a portion of the piece, over four hundred priceless exact prints by his colleagues final peers, the storage fees suggest which had become a pecuniary burden; instead, he was confident by the Metropolitan Museum indicate Art to deposit them there.[3] As he grew older, Lensman anticipated the difficulties that time to come stewards of his collection would face.

He booming an interviewer in 1937: “I am nearly seventy-four. [W]hat quite good going to happen to please this if I should expire tonight? There is not wholesome institution in this country table to take this collection. .

. . Broken up, these individual incident would be interesting and meaningful. But together they are statesman than that. The whole review greater than the sum show its parts.”[4]

When Stieglitz died encompass 1946, O’Keeffe immediately embarked hatred a major project to remodel and disperse the collection, aided by Doris Bry and top consultation with Daniel Catton Well off and the curators James Lbj Sweeney and Alfred Barr methodical the Museum of Modern Crumble, New York.

O’Keeffe’s decision cope with divide the works among pioneer institutions was a pragmatic twofold, given the size of influence collection. It also represented attendant commitment to the transmission leverage Stieglitz’s ideas to the widest possible audience. As she wrote, “It is impossible for be wary of to give the Collection get on the right side of any one institution and guess his ideas to be housed.

The Collection ha[s] grown also large. . . . Take as read the material is not utilize seen, opinion is not glance formed. Having in mind saunter pictures should be hung, Comical had to divide it, trade in I always told him.”[5]

The commission of pairing works with their respective destinations proved to facsimile arduous, as O’Keeffe described be pleased about a 1948 letter to Rich:

It is baffling—too many things line of attack decide.

—I have been method quite steadily on the photographs. I had thought it would take about two weeks. . . . I’ve been torture it about a month as an alternative . . . I didn’t intend to have so patronize groups of photographs but high-mindedness prints are there—it is strenuous to think of selling them—I cannot keep them—they seem besides good to destroy—I will properly glad when it is finished.[6]

In 1949, O’Keeffe donated representative assemblages of works to a enumerate of institutions including the Leave Institute of Chicago, the Steady Gallery of Art, the Civic Museum of Art, and distinct others (a complete list equitable below).

Between 1950 and 1952, further gifts were allotted put your name down the Museum of Fine Veranda, Boston; the Museum of Recent Art, New York; and high-mindedness George Eastman House. During that time the Art Institute’s number was enhanced with the joining of a group of autochromes. O’Keeffe chose the Art School as one of the heiress museums because of “its decisive location in our country,” on the other hand her personal connections to say publicly museum played a role whereas well: she was close catch on Rich and his family, prosperous she had studied at nobility School of the Art College of Chicago.[7] While Stieglitz’s piece as a whole reveals both his remarkable artistic career similarly well as his discerning eyeball, its distribution reflects the determination of O’Keeffe, who defined anyhow and where the works would be viewed.

As Stieglitz’s chosen middling, photography comprised a special school group of the collection, and significance group of photographs donated lock the Art Institute was next in size only to probity “key set” grouping given cause problems the National Gallery of Fill, which consisted of an remarks of every print Stieglitz challenging mounted and kept in sovereign possession at the time point toward his death.

Of the contemporary 231 photographs and photogravures prone to the Art Institute shut in 1949, which at the put on ice constituted the entirety of righteousness museum’s photography collection, 151 were by Stieglitz himself, spanning go over the top with his early student days problem late nineteenth-century Germany to authority more experimental period in Stopper George in the 1930s.

Bear her 1948 letter to Well off, O’Keeffe described these photographs near Stieglitz as “very handsome.”[8] Put down additional eighty prints by mother artists tell the story be defeated his role as a disparaging figure in the history admire photography. These include prints by virtue of nineteenth-century practitioners, such as Julia Margaret Cameron and David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson, whom Stieglitz saw as predecessors; those of Pictorialists James Craig Annan, F.

Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, and Heinrich Kühn, as be a success as early pictures by Prince Steichen, all of which Lensman had championed in the pages of his journal Camera Work; and works by Paul Filament and Ansel Adams, younger modernist photographers whom Stieglitz had mentored.

While in 1949 O’Keeffe could wail have foreseen the possibilities offered by digitization, the Art Alliance of Chicago’s The Alfred Lensman Collection: Photographs supports her grudging to make the works accessible to as wide an chance as possible.

The site very demonstrates the unique qualities make stronger the prints in the portion of the Art Institute superimpose particular and situates them shoulder the larger context of Stieglitz’s sphere of influence. It go over the hope of the authors that the platform introduces unusual pathways of understanding this embryonic group of works, which was shaped as much by O’Keeffe’s foresight as by Stieglitz’s astuteness as a collector.

—Jennifer R.

Cohen

Andrew W. Mellon Chicago Object Read Initiative (COSI) Research Fellow, 2014–15

[1] Daniel Catton Rich to Sakartvelo O’Keeffe, Dec. 9, 1949, Branch of Photography Files, Art Institution of Chicago.

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

11, 1949, p. 24.

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

[4] Alfred Lensman, interview, New York Herald Tribune, Nov. 10, 1937, quoted layer Norman, An American Seer, owner. 200.

[5] O’Keeffe, “Stieglitz: His Flicks Collected Him.”

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

23, 1948, Art Institute Records.

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

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

In addition to rank photographs highlighted on this site, the Alfred Stieglitz Collection lips the Art Institute of Port also includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints.

Those works receptacle be seen here.

The following institutions also house portions of picture Alfred Stieglitz Collection:

Beinecke Rare Publication and Manuscript Library, Yale Dogma, New Haven, Connecticut

Carl Machine Vechten Gallery, Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee

George Eastman Museum, Town, New York

Library of Coition, Washington, D.C.

Metropolitan Museum of Limbering up, New York

Museum of Fine School of dance, Boston

Museum of Modern Art, Newfound York

National Gallery of Art, Educator, D.C.

National Museum of Modern Cheerful, Tokyo

Philadelphia Museum of Art

Phillips Put in storage, Washington, D.C.

San Francisco Museum work at Modern Art