770.92 SSjam 57-097^3
Frank
American and Alfred Stieglita
0388
AMERICA & ALFRED STIEGLITZ
A Collective Portrait
AMERICA
Alfred Stieglitz
A Collective Portrait
Edited by WALDO FRANK - LEWIS
MUMFORD -
RUGG With 12O Illustrations
THE LITERARY GUILD - N*w York
PRINTED AT THE Country Lift Press, GARDEN CITY, N, Y*> u, s. A*
a man shall be as an hiding place from the tutnd f and
a covert front the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place f
its the shad out of a great rocJ^ in a weary land.
And the eyes of them that sec shall not be dint* and the
ears of them thttt hear shall hearken. ISAIAH. 3-a, at andi 3*
, verily* I say unto you, "Hxeept a corn of wheat fall
xrxta the ground and die* it tthideth alone: but if it die, it
forth much fruit. j<ntN. t a, 314,
CONTENTS
AMERICA AND ALFRED STJEOUT/; A COLLECTIVE PORTRAIT.
The Editors $
FAR! 1 GNU
L TIIK AMERICAN BACKGROUND: William Carlos Williams g
11. Tin', MiiTKni'ouTAN MiUKu: Lewis Mumfortl jj
111. THE BUY IN THE DARK ROOM; I\nd Roxcnfcld 50
IV* PIIOTOKKAWY BEFORE STJEcut/,: R. Child fittylcy A 1 p
V, 191: A VISION THUOUI*!! FnotocatAPiiY:
VL AN AMERICAN PI^IK: Durothy
PART TWO
VII* PoKT*lMrRKiU(iNtMM: RulpA Flint if 5
V1I1, Tint Arnrr ANII TIIK (>RAT TRANSITION; Harold K^igg 179
IX. TilK %Sl(iNH'ICAN(;K tl< STIf^In7. t'0 Tllli PlIILOSflWIT OF
SotHNr-t-;; Kvrlyn tttntwd
X* Tun NEW WORM* IN SrtK<u.tr/.: H'Ma l f Mnt(
VARIATIONS ON THE THKMK
I, SftW*tIT7 AMI* Tlfll AMMftlCAN TRAIlITItiNt I
1L Till MAM ANti THE PLM*.
t. The Man rtiit! the Place: //i/i Wurm a? I
j. a*|i am! the ilr*tii HcwJ: MtMiitn Hartley
viii CONTENTS
3. A Different One: Arthur G. Dove
4. Lighthouses and Fog: Charles Detmtth
5. A Portrait: Jennings Tofel
6. An American Experience: Edna Bryner
7. The Room : Dorothy Brett
8. A Witness : Victoria' Qcampo
9. Alfred Stieglitz and the Group Idea: Harold
dut-man
10. Stieglitx: Gertrude Stein
III. PHOTOGRAPHY
1. Alfred Stieglitz and a Machine: Paid Strand 28 X
2. A Note on the Esthetic Significance of Photog
raphy : Evelyn Scott
IV. CITY PLOWMAN
i. The Hill: Jean Toomer
a. City Plowman: Sherwood Anderson
ILLUSTRATION PLATES
APPENDIX $ jr /
Chronology jit
Representative List of Exhibitions Arranged by Alfred
Stieglit
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX
LIST OF ARTISTS WHOSE WORK IS ILLUSTRATED
D. O. Hill
Margaret Julia Cameron
J. Crai$ Annan
Alvin Langdon Cobum
Baron de Meyer
Robert JDcmachy
Captain Puyo
Rcnc*e Lc B&guc
Thee* and Oscar 1 lofmcister
Professor Hans Wutv.ek
I icinrich Kuhn
Eduard J Stcichcn
Cbrc?nce IL White
I ? runk Eugene
Gertrude Kascbkr
Parnetft Caiman Smith
Auguste Rodin
Henri Mmttiie
Conttantin Brancusi
Primitive Negro Sculpture
Pablo Picasso
Georges Braquc
Alfred Maurer
Max Weber
Arthur O. Dove
Paul Strand
Marius de Zayas
Gordon Craig
Henri Rousseau
Paul CcV.annc
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
EHc Hadelman
Francis Picabia
Marsden Hartley
Abraham Walkowitz
Charles l>emuth
S, McDonald Wright
Gascon La chaise
John Marin
Georgia O'JCeeffe
Alfred Stieglitz
AMERICA & ALFRED STIEGLITZ
A Collective Portrait
AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
A Collective Portrait
IS BOOK IS NOT A COLLECTION OP TRIBUTES,, it IS 0Qt a
slum of opinions, it is not a compilation of facts about a man*
The life of Alfred Stieglitz has been lived in active relation with the
world; his work has been in the deepest sense a communal work.
This book is an attempt to express the nature of the career of Alfred
Stieglitsc by being, itself, in spirit and form, a communal work, a
work organic with its subject.
It begins with a study of the cultural background, the specific
Pioneer-Puritan culture, from which all creative work in the United
States derives, directly and indirectly; and with a portrait of the
nineteenth-century city of New York which was the fruit of that
culture, the scene of the modern revolt and emergence from it, and
the specific matrix of the life of Stieglitz. A biographical interpreta
tion of the man follows, a first intimate sighting of his person;
then an account of the mecltum~photogr%iphy in which he
achieved hi* most impersonal expression, and portraits of the gath
ering places of men and of art, and o the human relations, in which
he ha* fulfilled his creative purpose. Thin is Part One: it may be
aaid tci prc*em the l>ody of the *ubject in concrete social terms. Part
Two drawn the ideological dimcnrian* and continues the historic
line 1 * through our immediate and urgent present into the future be
fore us, U *udiea, *pecif!cally, the movement* of art in the period
spanned by Stieglitsr* linking IMS work and that of his group with
the work cif Europe; it portray* the intellectual and educational
directive* nt home* epitomised under such terms as Pragmatism
and lfutrumemali*m v and the place and symbolic share therein <
Sftcglte; finally it endeavor* to *!tuutc Stieglitx, a$ the leader of a
communal creative mtwcmcm, within the march of modern thought
4 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGL1TZ
and within the central preoccupation of our era: the creating of a
new civilization, a new culture, a new world. This concludes Part
Two: the Theme. But in the judgment of all who know him, an
essential aspect of the creative work o Stieglitz is his relationship
with individuals and his effect upon them. This indeed is the color
and music of the man ? and no collective portrait would be complete
without its recording. Hence, the last division of the text: Varitt*
tions on the Theme. It is really a collection of brief portraits of per
sons mirrored within their own experience of Sticglitz. Since for
fifty years Stiegllcz has lived in constant intimate contact with the
lives and works of men and women, these variations of the theme
in the modality of sensitive Americans, South Americans, Euro
peans, are integrally of the theme itself.
Of course, the idea of such a took as this had to start la the heads
o specific individuals, But as soon as it was abroad it nourished
itself, it took on body like aa organic being. The idea mack certain
contributors inevitable; once exposed to it, they responded. Others
proved themselves inevitable by spontaneously aiming forward
with collaborations that belonged in the communal undertaking.
The specific subjects of the collaborator! wc inncrly determined
by their owa nature and by the nature of their relationship with
Stieglitz.
Such a process could not be precise. The cultural life in America
that Stieglitz's work has shared, nurtured, and projected, and which
this book was designed to express is not delimited like* a biological
body; nor could It be logically controlled beforehand like the *unt
mation of an epoch that had already flowered. This life* after u!l
and 8tteglit% himself (a* the book rcvesilijt is largely a
There have been contributor!* whnse work, ffir one or an*
other, could unfortunately 1101 be in iliis itt it*
form evolved; there are
may at first appear to the march of the whole* fell in
reality to be organic with the and are
potential collaborator* who, of time or c$r ctf
knowledge on our part or have not their contribution.
The*e imperfection* of trial and error are of the world which
Sdegitz ha* helped to alive within our American time. Yet
our however inadequacy at leant to articutatr that
AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ 5
world; and, by its variety of vision, and its community o structure,
to embody it. It is, in itself, a proof that the spirit lives in America
today. And this concerns us more (as it does Alfred Stieglitz) than
the book's personal subject.
This world which Stieglitz has embodied and projected through
nearly fifty years of intricate creative action is, we feel, important
in the precise sense that Man is important; in the precise sense that
the struggle toward truth is important; in the sense that America,
as a favored soil where truth may be sought and where Man may
live, is potentially important. And this book we feel is significant,
perhaps, in that it reveals this world through the collective por
trayal o a contemporary whose life has been an incarnation, singu
larly perfect, of the struggle toward truth, an incarnation indeed, in
humble modern form, of Man. . * and in American terms and on
American soil.
THE EDITORS.
New
PART ONE
I. THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND
TEY" SAW BIRDS with nuty breasts and called them robins. Thus*
Jrom the start, an America of which they could have had no
inkling drove the first settlers upon thdr fast. They retreated for
tmrmth and reassurance to something previously familiar. But at a
cost. For what they saw were not robins. They were thrushes only
vaguely resembling the rosy, daintier English bird. Larger, stronger*
and in the evening of a wilder, livelier song, actually Acre u?a$
something the newcomers had never in their lives before encoun*
tared* Blur. Confusion. A bird that beats with his wings and slows
himself with his tail in landing*
The example is slight but enough properly to incline the under*
standing* Strange and difficult, the new continent induced a torsion
in the spirits (if the first settlers, tearing them between the old and
the *M And ^ once a split occurred in that impetus u/hkh should
have earned them forward <w om int the dmgerous realities of
the /Mure.
They found that they had not only left tut #A? they
had at a reality rftf-
mantled m$ only & bodily but at /tf% and
mom importunately, of adaptability, a recon-
tirurtion a/ their mo$t intimate cultural m&^e^p, m with
the new conditions* The most md turned Jw^ in their
stt the first glance*
nwtatgietdly, erroneously, a robin*
It Is conceivable thai a new might have sprung up with
I he new and the new amlitkms, but even genius, if it
cxUtcd, did not erne* It wot m inability of the mind to funo*
io AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
tion 10 the face of overwhelming odds, a retreat to safety, an im
mediate defensive organization of whatever sort against the wilder
ness. As an emergency, the building up of such a front was neces
sary and understandable, But, if the falsity of the position is to be
appreciated, what they did must he understood to have been a
temporary expedient, permissible only while a new understanding
was building.
Thus two cultural elements were left battling for supremacy, one
looking toward Europe, necessitous but retrograde in its tendency
though not wholly so by any means and the other forward-
looking but under a shadow from the first. They constituted two
great bands of effort, which it would take a Titan tu bring together
and weld into one again. Throughout the present chapter! the terms
native and borrowed, related and unrelated, primary and secondary*
will be used interchangeably to designate these two opposed split-
ofs from the full cultural orcc% and occasionally, In the vein*
true and false.
The English settlers* on the northeast coast, were con
cerned in this division of the attack, but it was they who would
establish the predominant mode and its consequences. Further
southj and it is important to note that It was to the smith and in
California, where the climate was milder, that this balder phase of
the colonization had its brief flowering, an attempt on a different
scale was instituted Under the Spanish the sixtcenth-cc ntury univer
sities, bishoprics, and works of a like order* confirmed a project
diametrically opposed to what the English umlcrMoofl, What they
seemed to have in mind was no colony at all, but within the folds
of their religions hegemony an extension nf Spain herself to the
westward. But the difficulties were too great, too iiiiii;igiii*it>ly
novel to the grasp of ihctr minds for them to succeed.
From geographic, biologic, political, am! economic cath<% thr
Spanish conception ended In failure* ami the Blower, colder, more*
practical plan of lesser scope out of northern Kttrttpr prevailed,
North America tacamc, in great a colony cif Knglant!, o
to be regarded by the intellect and fashion of the day. While w the
part of most of the there would be a reciprocal attitude
toward "home** The immediate cultural in
* disdain for the a
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND
looking back toward fashion brought to It by Its governors and
copied In America wherever possible.
Nowhere is the antagonism o the times toward local Initiative
better shown than in An Official Report on Virginia (1671), by
Governor Sir William Berkeley, when he wrote:
1 thank God there are no free schools or printing, and 1 hope we shall
not have these hundred years, for learning has brought disobedience,
and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing has divulged them,
and libels against the best government, God keep us from both.
Alongside all this, nevertheless, an enterprise neither Spanish nor
English, nor colonial by any way o speaking save in its difficulty
and poverty o manner, began widely to form, a new reference by
which knowledge and understanding would one day readjust them*
selves to a changing world, It was America itself which put up Its
head from the start to thrive in mode of life, in character of in
stitutions, in household equipment, in the speech, though opposed
with might and main everywhere from the official party both at
home and abroad. Noah Webster spent a life here building the
radically subversive thesis which his dictionary represents. But the
same force began pushing Its way forward in any number of other
forms also* Necessity drove it ahead. Unorthodox* it raa beside the
politer usages o the day never^ except in the moment of a
threatened national catastrophe, the Revolution, to be given a gen
eral sanction*
It was a harsh world the first men had to face. He who baa seen
the hill coming up from the waterfront at Plymouth, changed
though It be from all possible reiemblaacc to the poverty of that
day, will have no trouble for 11 that in imagining the bareness,
the exposure* o those first isolated buildings regularly kid
out either side the one climbing street. Merely to read the stone
which commemorates the fifty per cent death rate of that first
winter Is enough to the picture of tragedy on the mind* But
jus! the bare statement in the chronicles of the necessity the people
were under to bury their at night so m not to give the natives
knowledge o their rapidly diminishing numbers while they waited
for the to return* tic of terror and an alien
12 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
mood toward the land upon the mind indelibly. And these things
were repeated north and south in a hundred other instances.
The land was from the first antagonistic. The purpose must
have been in major part not to be bound to it but to push back its
obstructions before the invading amenities to drive them before
one. To force them back. That these transplanted men were at the
same time pushing back a very necessary immediate knowledge of
the land to be made theirs and that indeed all that they possessed
and should henceforth be able to call their own was just this com
plexity of environment which killed them, could not become at
once apparent.
Even the Revolution would prove anything but a united move
ment toward self-realisation on the part c>C America* The colonist*
did not, except in their humbler parts, clcsire separation from the
mother countrynot in the beginning, at any rate. It took time fur
the national consciousness to make itself known, and against heavy
odds. The significance of these old conflicts Is often lout now, but
valuable light arises in them again and throughout the annals*
The conflict existed strongly in the intimate nature of the com-
mander4n-chie Eimsell He did not for more than a year sifter the
beginning of the Revolution think of his action as anything but the
protest of a loyal subject to Ms king* Not till sifter bitterest realisa
tion of disappointed hopes did the full force oC the tiling break
heavily upon him* It caused Washington a wrench not only of the
heart but o the understanding itself to drag himself away from
England.
The two divergent forces were steadily at work, one drawing
the inhabitants back to the accustomed with its ^ifipfati ro loyalty
and the love of comfort* the other prodding thrw to facf very often
the tortures of the damned* working a new way into a doubtful
future, calling for faith, courage, and cardtwneus of spirit, If W4
be it noted, an inner tension* st cultural cli!emm*t* whidt w*i flw*
of this. As corroborating evidence of which* note furilirr tlut
It was Thotrtait Jeffcwon, a man of and curimttly Iwiiiiceil
mentality, not a seikiter, who environed drafted the
tion of Independence* And it a of
ttgacity 9 Benjamin Franklin* who the atitl
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND 13
ccssful exponent of the project to take into native hands and to
deal directly, by force, if necessary, with the world of their time,
Washington's unique place in the history is that of the blame
less leader, the great emblem, almost the unconscious emblazonment
of the cause. As a soldier he was merely a servant. The other out
standing figure was John Adams, representing the relic obstinacy
of the original Pilgrims.
The war over, the true situation, raised into relief by patriotic
fervor, would flatten out as before into the persistent struggle be
tween, the raw new and the graciousness of an imposed cultural
design* England eliminated, those very ones who opposed her
would fast take the leading place in the scheme from which she had
been driven, renewing the old struggle at home* The fashionable
would still be fashionable, and the unfashionable, unfashionable as
before.
la this inevitable conflict of interests Thomas Jefferson stands out
as the sole individual who seems to have had a clear understand
ing of what was taking place. He did appear to see the two trends
and to make a conscious effort to embrace them and to draw them
together Into a whole, But even for him, the disparity remained un
bridgeable in his day* It wai Jefferson who, when President, would
walk to Ms office m the mud, out of principle, and walk home
as the others who would f ignoring the mud, ride.
And at the time it was Jefferson who, recognizing the
Imperious necessity for other loveliness to lay beiide Ms ow% such
m it wait would inquire whether or not it might be possible, in
a to get one who could at the time play
the flute. His home tt Monticello t with its originality,
with Iti distinctive local quality* ii oae o the few where the
two cultural approach la our history, where they consciously
But Jefferson 1 ! idea would be sadly snowed under,
While it wai that Jefferson should directly Ml in propt-
Ml cultural it was at the time the good for-
o Indirectly to
New saw things in a
wty that of Virginia* Hi primarily technical*
with the all upon the im-
him his will in the right direction.
i 4 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
Though there seems always too much of the bumptious provincial
in Franklin, he had the luck. For America has approached the
cultural plateau from this necessitous technical side.
But with the beginners, facing difficulties, things did not go so
well at first. America had to be before it could become effective-
even in its own mind. Finding itself, as a democracy, unable to
ta\e up the moral and economic implications of its new conditions*
which Jefferson lived and proposed^ America slumped bacl{ to
fashion on the one, favored, side, and, having slighted the difficult
real, it fell back at the same time to unrelated, crazy rigidities and
imbecilities of formal pattern, later to blossom as DowieUm, Billy-
Sundayism ? etc-, etc., to say nothing of the older schisms over
petty ritual of the same sort Confusion, a leaderlm mob* each
wandering into a mire of its own with perfect logic,
All this weight would one day have to be lifted in the final cul
tural pick-up still waitingtremendous, a on the
neck for the time being at it left crushed,
When the first courageous drives toward a occupation
of America slackened* men like Bocae, and Houiton hid
to be accounted for. It ii not hard to fabricate melodramatic
for them- The hard thing to do is to the of
what they were appear Integral with the history, effective in t
direct understanding, of what men have today.
historically because of their pieturesqueness or a
with a gun, actually the cultural place men occupy is the tig*
nificant one- And if it always to romanticise i thing
than to understand it It is m very often it Is more con
venient to do so. Especially is thii true when to romsuuicixe u tiling
covers a significance which may be disturbing m lying
science,
For Boone, at was not a romantic* liiitiirlf in the
"mystery** of the forest* He was a of the wuctd
enjoying, in that the of the
craftsmen, who remained in of hit ami
AccompUshmenti. What to the of
the He wi of the iiitl
ew to as on*
The o aid of the ctf hit aniJ
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND 15
trade, was that they abandoned touch with those along the coast,
and their established references, and made contact with the intrin
sic elements of an as yet unrealized material of which the new
country was made. It is the actuality of their lives, and its tragic
effect on them, which is illuminating.
All of them, when they did come back to the settlements, found
themselves strangers. Houston, as late as Lincoln's time, lived apart
from his neighbors, wearing a catskin vest, whittling a stick and
thinking. But the reason underlying this similarity of action ia
all of them is not that they were outmoded but rather defeated ia
a curious way which baffled them* Only Jackson carried the crude-
ness of his origins successfully up to the top by the luck of battle,
and for a short time only* And when he did, as Ezra Pound has
recently pointed out, it was Jackson who, because of his basic cul
ture, was able first to smell out the growing fault and attack the
evidence of a wrong tack having been taken, the beginning raid oa
public moneys by private groups, which he turned back for a few
years*
Such men* right thinking; but prey to isolation by the forces sur
rounding them, became themselves foreigners m their own coun
try. They were disarmed by the success o their ofter4ivmg
neighbor*, a which cm now be marked as the growing
influence of the false cultural trend* Actually Boone wits a genius,
lamed by the gigantic newness which won him but into which he
could not penetrate far enough it was Impossible* At he sig-
rightly what was to be done. Such had no way of
their vocal, They part of
the wilderness which the
battling* Their survives Many of them could
hardly read* Their crude. Their tnanners
It wai the penalty they kid to pay.
It ii curioun anomaly. They in themielvet had achieved i
a tu the condition* about them, which was of
the int and which, at the time, oddly cut them of!
the
during a subject to the
tad was In to the grow-
ing laxity el hii time* by virtue, be ii of the actuality of this
16 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
same backwoods training, which in his case did not last long
enough to hold him entirely in its narrowing grasp. Another evi
dence of his great shrewdness. But, at the pinch, it was this which
later stood him in good stead, though it caused him, at the same
time, endless suffering. It was powerful by its direct relation to
actuality but remained heavily opposed by a more fashionable
choice. Not he, but Roger Morris got the wealthy Mary Philipse.
It was precisely that which gave them their realistic grasp
of situations and things which made these men unacceptable to
their world of a rising cultural tide, gone astray, but of the sort
which would predominate. Washington had all kinds of luck* quite
apart from his character, to get through alive, He did manage to
maintain himself intact, but only at the cost of a tremendous isola
tion, at a time of national stress which required the unique strength
of moral base possessed by him which came from a compteiity of
events in his birth and bringing up, and In which iJbe were
lacking. But he was generously hated for it* All manner of
dogged his steps in the attempt to break Mi difficult
His realization of what he was after came out one night when,
on his way to West Point from Hartford, he through a
Connecticut town. The women and children came out with
to cheer him and accompanied him t short dittaace on hit way.
This is the army, he said* that they will never conquer* It is
conceivable that with less luck he could have bcea
and the mud they threw at his carriage during his in
the Presidency not have been counted among Mi laurels, He
out because, like Boone, he stuck fast to facts which hit
adherence above the glamour of an easier fortune. He was ihrcwcl
and powerful in other respects, but ii was the unswerving
integrity by which he clove to the actual conditions of his position
which was at the bottom of his It wais the of a
cultural adjustment of the first
One is it liberty to what the to
world culture have If It hacl Bur
that is merely m
destroyed hdldi the key* dm it the thai
Tenodttbdia itt miy Hilt be
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND 17
kept alive in thought not as something which could have been pre
served but as something which was actual and was destroyed*
One might go on to develop the point from this that the Ameri
can addition to world culture will always be the "new," in
opposition to an "old" represented by Europe- But that isn't satis
factory* What it is actually is something much deeper: a relation to
the immediate conditions o the matter in hand, and a determina
tion to assert them in opposition to all intermediate authority, Deep
In the pattern of the newcomers* minds was impressed that conflict
between present reliance on the prevalent conditions of place and
the overriding of an unrelated authority* It is that which,* at its
best, comes like the cut of a knife through old sophistry but it
requires the sklUM wielding of a sharp knife. And this requires a
trained hand*
Not that this direct drive toward the new w a phenomenon dis
tinctively confined to America: it is the growing edge in every
culture, But the difficulties encountered in settling the new ground
dicl make it a clearer necessity in America* or should have done
50 <learer than it could have beta shown to be otherwise or else
where* To Americans the effort to appraise the real through the
of a cut oil and Imposed culture from Europe has bceit* a
vivid task* If very often too great for their realizations. Thus the
new and the real, hard to come at, are synonymous.
The abler the cut themselves off from the
old at and set to work with a will directly to know what wts
had to be It could even
In its own It set out And, by Go4 it *was.
It couldn't wait Crudely the bulk of a real
was built up from that point- The they
in many by m the char-
of the men and was In many it
knit within of the wish in cries of
lor out by Columbus'* an the new world
for the first and before
them*
At il as in
the wild dies of the Wilson 9 * car-
x8 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
riage whea he held up his hope o escape in 1918. But, unrealised
in America itself, there too it slipped away again.
It isn't just to say that the acquisition of borrowed European cul
ture was in itself a bad thing. It was, moreover, inevitable that it
should be brought here. As inevitable as the buying of legislatures
many years later in order that railroads might with the least pos
sible delay be laid across the country. It, is only unfortunate that
this sort of thing should be taken to be virtue itself, a makeshift,
really, in constant opposition to the work of those good minds
which had the hardihood to do without it. The appurtenances o
Europe came in with their language and habits, more finished
than anything native could have been that is, barring Indian
workmanship and manner, which were of slight value in the East*
As a matter of fact, these borrowed effects were better in quality
than the native,
Samuel Butler's famous witticism, O God, O Montreal! 10 the
sort of jibe the authentic crudeness had to weather at the ittrt*
But while the men working toward the were
their new tools of thought, welding their to new
uom with the situation as it existed, the of the
were In closer and closer touch with the Old World By improve*
mcnt of the means o transportation* the slow accumulation of
goods, and the coming to the New World of more gentle type*,
these secured their hold marc and more on the American cultural
scene.
It was all right to say, as Foe did, writing we
should cut ourselves loose from the lead of our
grandmima. He dicl soto the confrution of critic* even to the
present daybut few could follow him. And Charles
weU reply by hi* well-known attack an American
vituperation tatted by astonishment before & he could
not explain* Wider and wider the two of effort drew ufmtt,
the difiiioa which inevitably by
the two or tos in it
win tint the ami
by the the
should the
the would be n
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND * 9
of the State which, under the powerful influence of Washington
and his associates, had been constructed. There would be an ac
celerated dropping back to style and the unrelated importations,
Boone*s lands would be stolen away from him by aid of un
scrupulous land speculators with influence in Congress, and he
would go off to Spanish territory around St. Louis in disgust of his
race. It was not "culture" of either sort, to be sure, which drove him
out, but it was under the necessities, the conditions, under the
skirts o the borrowed lack of attachment, that the agencies throve
which were his undoing.
Nor is this solely aa American difficulty. It is seen in such things
as the steady decay of life in the Shetland Islands, while the Faroes,
less favorably situated to the north, too far for exploitation by the
London markets, have begun a regeneration under a rediscovered
genius of place* A like impetus is behind the bombing by a young
and patriotic Breton of the memorial celebrating the absorption of
Brittany by a greater France. The attempt of an unrelated culture
upon a realistic genius o place is deeply involved in these events,
as in the undying movement to free Ireland.
But in America the struggle was brilliant and acute* It was also
an ft vaster scale.
Maay a us, who should knew better, are quick to brand Ameri*
with the term "colonial" if In a moment o irritatioo some
Yankee up aad wants to wipe out, let us sty, French paint
ing* In a loud voice he lew got We can paint as well or intend
shortly to do Well show l enau
But it a more to the from which
an outburst might li Is this: The chief for
cannot be but in the devising o (or in destroy
ing it, for it would be to destroy the worthless) which is in
of the approach of equals. And though it is
to milk a cow and to use its milk (as well as its maaurc)
it is quite as profitable tit another way to talk with a man of sense
tad and to and carry out with him cul
tural I&pecially is this delightful, or o value, when that
find re new to us by that much more
in a way on old of judgment,
In md borrowed'* where it eoutcf* u cul-
2 o AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
ture or at least the warmth of it ad interim* But this, valuable
for the moment and later also as an attribute of fashion and wealth,
fixed itself upon the mind until, the realization of the actual, origi
nal necessity being largely forgotten, it even went so far that
Americans themselves no longer believed in it,
Meanwhile an unrelated Hopl ceremonial unrelated, that is,
except to the sand, the corn, the birds, the beasts, the periodic
drought, and the mountain sights and colors was living m the
farther West*
A servile copying of Europe, not Jefferson^ became the rule.
And along with it a snobbism from which or from the effects of
which very few escaped. The secondary split-off from what, but
for fear, had been a single impetus, finally focused itself as personal
wealth in America, important since it is wealth that control* the
mobility of a nation* But dt0gerou$ by Its control it can
and so render real values, in effect, impotent*
So, being hdd m a pr erogttive, wealth, by the it
may become Ac chid cause ol cultural This ha*
the case in Amadou To support it* own It hat to
surround itself with the appurtenances of a culture which
is of no direct significtnce in the new But by thin
such a culture of purchase, a culture in effigy, ha*
rant The harm is done* The primary cultural influence
by the unfortunately impoverished native, to a
Wealth weat on* The cities were it* seat By its of
money men flocked to them> leaving the already and
often failing culture of immediate still behind*
The small cities and oramunttie* involving wine <rf
the population to wane In
life has actually occupied iinly by
cWpmuaks and porcupine*. of
drained off by a 001 quite m m it hat
10 be,
Ccrtmaly the to awl
the the
tioa and the of 01 A!! In*
One rib fact But the pi ttf
of a in this mill to the
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND 21
unstoppable, may nevertheless be traced out and recorded. The
cities had at least population and a quickened pulse, but in getting
this, as in everything where the secondary culture predominates, the
cost was severe, It involved the actual decay of the small com
munity* And the decay of the small community was a primary cul
tural decay. It would seem as if the city has as its very being the
raising of the cultural level, as if it were in the very stream of the
great flow* Quite the opposite is true, unless the place of the city,
as a sort of turntable and that only, be clearly realized.
The decay of the small community was an actual decay of cul
ture; k was a sack by invisible troops, leaving destruction for
which the gains and they were considerable did not compen
sate. It was a loss which degraded, which was compelled by cir
cumstances but which posited a return to sources in some form
later on. The inevitable destruction of the South during the Civil
War was of this order. It was the overwhelming desire for an im
mediate realization of wealth, for escape from isolation which made
wealth paramount and to be fought for, at aay cost. Wealth meant,
as it means today, the control of movement, mobility, the power to
come and go at will In small communities being drained of wealth
by the demand for it in the cities, men died like rats caught in a
trap* And their correctly timed but crude and narrow beginnings
died with them*
Take such a place as H-~, Vermont, apart from the difficulties
with the water supply fottea and fallen into decay Inspiration,
the lull spirit, could ever it possible for mm tor
live It is that tremendously v ojbtile and Important
has withdraws. Without to an reality,
could have lived in closed'-ofl And with it Mfe
can up in the very
A culture is a plant o a sort* It itsd every*
But an unrelated culture ii neither hardy nor proliic.
It wis the reality of the community which the ten>
tory in the first but the which blotted
that out* it was the of the active strain*
which hat loft relic of which survives today. It was a
an superiority of wealth
22 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
the struggles of a related culture grew $till less and less. The very
roots were being dried up.
Note well, that there is a hard law of the world which governs
the emergence and disappearance of men as o communities and
nations: To the victor belong the spoils* The cultural effects of
America are governed by this as everything else is governed. Noth
ing is good because it is American, as nothing survives merely bc
cause it is authentic. The false may and often does supersede it*
But the law is operative, like every other law, only under definite
conditions. These may be ascertained and measured.
All that is being said is that it must be realised that men arc
driven to their fates by the quality of their beliefs. And that in
America this has been the success of the unrelated, borrowed* the
would-be universal culture which the afterwavc has ma 10 or
imposed on men to impoverish them, if it has not actually
francWsed their intdligenc.
At the force of the crude but for
without money to it
less had some The drive oC
tion as mentioned above, in inventiveness* Crude* at
first, aeccsiitou% immediate* hftnd*UMnouth that win the first test*
That it could not afford to mi anything. It hue! to be cut
and go*
And wealth took the representative ol a ort of
spirit irresponsible became unrelated to lite territory it
And wealth, iit this temper, grew to be intolerant to the
culture it replaced. It thai, this mobility
aligned itself m it did and shown itself antagonistic i the
related* But being secondary and inferior let the? first,
the for the antigontim is plainly tlitccrniblt?. Thi*
cil inferiority of portion Is tit flic of much itwl
was tolerated by flic rich is time went cm, as m pointed out
by Lincoln in to in
lion.
It wti the ol Utttt rule of
and the tan of in
to its me and nd hti niul
the 01 and lie
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND 23
dawn of civilization," Particularly vicious was this in a Democracy
with the history which had been America's, since it was just that,
as the note was set, which the first white men had come here to
escape*
And still, men flocked to the cities.
Against this heavy tide, the real cultural forms might take on
an unconscious beauty of refinement in the lines of fast ships and,
in more conscious form, the carved and painted figureheads of the
ships themselves. It might produce glassware, such collectors* items
as the wooden marriage chests of Pennsylvania workmanship, an
architecture old and new, and many other things as well exempli
fied as anywhere by the furniture in white pine and other native
woods built by the Shakers in their colonies along the New York-
Connecticut border. Beautiful examples are these of what could be
clone by working in a related manner with the materials in hand;
they arc plastically the most truthful monuments to the sincerity of
the motives that produced them that could well be imagined. Here
was a sect, isolated by their beliefs, living iti small self-sufficient
communities Decking to make what they needed out of what they
had for the quiet ami disciplined life they sought. It was a bigoted,
small life, a closing in of themselves for a purpose, but it was
simple and inoffensive. All these qualities appear in the workman-
ship* ft kind of gentle parable to the times* To no purpose* It was
vitally necessary that wealth should accumulate, It did It couldn*t
help it The consequences were persistent and unfortunate* And
the of fashion, partisans of the colonial spirit! had to be to
the locally in a secondary place, They art and
culture* and the art and culture they and for, major
in quantity* overshadowed the often defective and ineffectual new*
And there it; The insecurity all men felt in the predominance
of this culture* unrelated to the new conditions, made
for security in money all the more, With
the abandonment of the primiry effort and the further
and erf population at the centers* the
and the depletion of the rural districts*
It is in that with his of reality had ao
to his "vine and % tree 1 though he
24 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
shared equally with the others, it must be said 9 the common lust for
money and the security it could buy.
Men went to the cities, correctly, not even for the cash directly
so much as because of the growing spiritual impoverishment of
the outlying districts, a breakdown which brought a moral break
down in its train. How could it be otherwise? The actual, the
necessity for dealing with a condition as it existed, seemed to be
come unnecessary because of mystical powers represented by money-
Decay must, therefore, immediately have got in motion among the
faculties which fastened the pioneer to his world.
And the agent serving this colossal appetite for wealth, what has
come to be known as "the law/ 1 became in fact the index of the
moral corruption of the time, actually not the law, but a professional
class of law breakers. In Lincoln Steffens's autobiography, the
structure of this moral decay is laid bare in its childlike simplicity:
the economic, the military, the political tt the top all who
were in power swept up by the predominant,
had been practising* It grew a rolling up
together, minister and financier. Senator and
and man* young and oldfashion and But being unrelated)
having no btsis in the conditions o the place, It had 10 hate
power by other means* and it had to have it quickly*
Museums were founded. Country operas founded And
In the ^generosity 11 of their this of generations believed
they offered an cse for their actions* The baleful architecture of
certain of the years might have made them think* but ic xtptwar*
not to have done so. Religion a stencil which
a mm to t pitch of hatred the form and repetitious
of itf that would never be eradicated from his nature
But those at the tap, ant! set
enviable mobility, relied cm the lawycrflitician<ifficehfilcier or pro-
intermediary is the to
II ! the the the
peif urer f the is the s the
erf tto the by in
thi of In
tnd the 10 at it hit the
of ta the But in
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND 35
Golcotida look like a copper penny, it would run, a fire through the
grass, more wildly than anything the world had ever seen before.
The organization of the underworld would be exactly the replica,
the true picture, of the national government until finally they
fused actually into one in the early years of the century, unabashed.
Incredible, fairy-tale-like, even offensively perverse as it may seem,
it is the fear, the cowardice, the inability before the new, which in
America whipped the destructive false current on like a forest fire,
And, though it is not easily to be believed, it is a sense of their in
ferior position which drove the early fortunes on to their exorbi
tant excesses.
A board of directors of a great national corporation which has
been using a man's patent illegally for ten years owes him two
million dollars in back royalties* He institutes suit against them.
He one man without money. But ia this case there are incrimi
nating letters on file in the Department of Justice* Now, These
letters may be destroyed if someone in Washington can be fixed*
The mm may possibly be bluffed out of a realization of his aspira-
tians, or a feeling of futility toward his quest may unhorse him*
Or he may be murdered, if possible, "accidentally, 1 ' There's the
set-up. And the law has devised for itself an immunity so that it
may with perfect Impunity "legally 11 serve not onJy the corporate
ruler himself but his servants and imitators all down the line to
the lowest crook! event to the point of such technical minutw of
a verdict as that one of the jurors 1$ slightly hard of
hearing*
do, very certainly* hold the admira
tion of the en who wish they abo could be of* be
to pay for* a friend as the law In time of need.
The of i primary culture went on diminishing, by
through the work of t Whitman or a Poe; and there
the race for trade around the world*
snd in the yardi of their tnd crcw% a refined uchool
of at Melville
took up hit with the which by that
time had in diverting every nickel of the gov-
into And of t
Wiliofi would nil be making
26 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
relative to the menace to government of a vast and Illusive credit
power.
And still somewhat later, money was being consciously thrown
away to known bankrupts, Brazil, Peru, and the German Reich,
for the sole apparent purpose of impoverishing the region in which
the bankers happened to maintain their traffic* Dizzily they con
ceded credits to allied corporate interest* at the same time calling
small loans in order to pinch out the individual borrower, thus
intrenching themselves in the monopoly and impoverishing the
little man more and more till he should leave the field or take !m
and less in wages,
But this ascendancy of a secondary culture* secure in, wealth, was
gained not without results that were ludicrous a* well as tragic*
Wealth established museums, but it could not tell, it had to be told*
what was good in them* Nor can It do anything with the treasure*
of the ages but stand by, while the primary employ them
with taste, understanding, and, it may be finally, with There
were the Boni de Castellanes* the Tiara nge o
box-holders sleeping through the music or wondering what the hell
it wts ail tbout> while the American Ivcs, un
known*
And nowhere better than in the of Ives ii shown flic typical
effects of this neglect; witness phenomenally intelligent ami original
conceptions^ never fully oriented and worked out for of the
accessary orchestra to work with; recognition first abroad* but a
recognition tempered by the palpable deficiencies in ftitblt bred of
the inimicabki atmosphere In which the work of a lifetime WMK
spent; effects on his character the product of it |nti!c ioiatirn, hit
designation as an eccentric~ift typical American retort it* flic
ttoas genius ends by to its a
retirement from the with mountains of unfmiihrd ami
hal4uushed projects, in which the of ttir
find "marvelous bits, 11 the of t "way of in
his time/ 1
At the time a of Ii
fully 0ver t a* to thi or tint they tin >r tin mil
or not *
ou% tad so tci the ever in Ai i
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND 27
postlude Ivcs's compositions are occasionally performed In cheap
auditoriums to the real audiences, potentially at least appreciative
but too late.
It is not to be gathered from this that first-rate work would be
set aside for inadequacies merely because of a name. Because a
thing is American or related to the immediate conditions it is not
therefore to be preferred to the finished product of another culture.
One merely presumes that in a flight of the intelligence the actual
body passes through various climates and zones of understanding
which are variable. It does not simply arrive at the destination by
virtue of wishes and good Intentions, And in passing from one
place to another it is changed by that which it encounters. It does
not just go and encounter nothing. If it did, there would be no
use in going, for it would be the same there as here* It is a question
of give and take, If there is no equation, no comparable value to
be set beside the first, adding or subtracting,, multiplying or dividing,
the thing stands alone and must stand impotent. America might
produce work of value u> Europe,
And on the other hand, one docs not disguise one's poverty by
enhancing one's appearance through the use of another's spiritual
favors.
Even an Emerson did not entirely escape* his genius as a poet
remaining too often circumscribed by a slightly hackneyed gentility*
He did not relate himself so well to the underlying necessity as his
style shows him to hive been related to the style o the essayists of
the older culturerunning counter to i world exploding around
him. Only at moments did his vigor through. His formal
thought did not set a sufficiently labile mold for his vigor* It
leads one to thitt, but for this, lie might have broken through
to an brilliance actually to him* He must have
written of secondary importance, since the correlation of his
effort was with the effulgence of other places and times whose
direct crmneetion with in actual he could not realize* The wrench-
ings of fate at his elbow, occupation with which would have put
him the efforts mi a first-rate, If cruder, basis* he avoided
or by to them into a world of thought which
lie* believed to be only lie couldn't se** whence it
2 8 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEOLITZ
had arisen. It had a ground, all must, but It was not his, while his
remained neglected.
He was a poet, in the making, lost. His spiritual assertions were
intended to be basic, but they had notand they have not today
the authenticity of Emily Dickinson's unrhymes. And she was of
the same school, rebelliously.
It is impressive to experience the reflection o the American dearth
in culture among women. Talk to her, to begin with, and see the
panorama of her desires. Take the one who is tall, alert, ami
anonymous. They lead her to incompletiorx*. What is there for her
to do outside a pioneer's lot, children, and the sentimentaliaation of
the term "mother*? Loving her and watching her, one sees ghostly
figures moving in that curious sexual brilliance. She will listen
avidly to the talk o a province, a cultural continent* which men
usually think to usurp to themselves* She will love only fully the
man who takes her there, where she life to her.
They love best where the drink a in o the attcl
this is the mirror to be used.
But who can blame them for to or if^thcy
caa? Or to someone with at if
manners, Hollywood brand or as it may 'be. Married^ they
and wish for a paid dance partner* It is one evidence* though
a IdEt-handed one, o the general lack* Is it a cultural lag
in women or aa alertaew to the cultural by
which, for their purposes, they search out the rare men? Mother*
wish their sons to be instructed* as that br
beautiful
On a broker's yacht, as a substitute* In what
else Is there to do but jump overboard?* and be found two
liter In the surf off Coney Island They at least
what is termed "action*" a trial of of n
And this may be up out of Into
higher into any very and
the caramon to all and to brr
towed out to sea clumped*
Whit we to to the be*
and this de A frw
Mlidtlrs.
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND 29
The ordinary, and I mean extremely ordinary, answer of what
would pass for refinement, in the sense that metal is refined out of
muck, is inaction with a taste for the draperies of thought. The
basis of the impasse is ignored. But without an understanding of
the structural difficulties underlying the anticipated pleasure, even
poetry might as well be taken in the vulgar sense.
It is seldom realized that what has been borrowed has arisen in a
direct necessity, just as the real culture of America must also arise
there and that it had a person and a set of circumstances that it
was made to fit It fits the new man under other conditions as any
borrowed clothes might fit someone of a different weight or com
plexion from him for whom they were originally intended.
The burning need of a culture is not a choice to be made or not
made, voluntarily, any more than It can be satisfied by loans. It
has to be where it arises, or everything related to the life there
ceases. It isn f t a thing: it's an act. If it stands still, it is dead* It is
the realization of the qualities of a place in relation to the life
which occupies it; embracing everything involved, climate, geo
graphic position, relative size, history, other cultures as well as the
character of its sands, flowers, minerals, and the condition of knowl
edge within its lx>rders. It is the act of lifting these things into an
ordered and utilized whole, which i culture* It isn*t something
left over afterward. That ii the record only. The act is the thing.
It be or avoided if life is to go on* It h in the fullest
that which is fit*
The thing that American* never to tee Is that French paint
ing, si in example of what is is to its own
tradition. In its own environment and history (which, it
Is true, we partly share)* and which, when they have done with
one moment of it arid have moved on to they
fully tell where they canto us* in short And that American paint
ing* to be of valwe^ have comparable relationships in its own
thus oif/y to attain proportions.
as for the helpful their eyes are filled with
But you kill the love of the which underlies
ill The waylaid, cheated sucker
will yet to post* When the of commercial lying Is
3 o AMERICA AND ALFRED STfEGLITZ
penetrated and something for a moment shows true, grotesque per
haps also, it will always be that which Americans will find amus
ing: Wintergreea for President; Ben Blue standing indolently and
in a storm of wild music making circles in the air with his finger
to caricature the violent exertions o Russian dancing. Or as the
orchestra plays, to start a fight which ends in the musicians, one
and all, smashing their instruments over cacli other's heads. How
ever, it is the pathetic charm of the cowlx>y which makes him
attractive and of use to the movie scenario and the Rodeo*
To many writers the great disappointment of the yearn juat after
the war was that Amy Lowell, while sensing the enterprise of it re
awakened local consciousness, touched it so half-hcartctiiy and did
so little to signal plainly the objective. Much ccnilcl have bent
accomplished by aid of what to be her
Pounds defeated at home, did far better, in from abrttacj*
The best Amy Lowell had to offer was to at (hat the iron
of poverty had better be sunk into the they'd
be the better for it* as Vilkm and Very
But that is no for a fully to and to the
project and its ccmditioni*
We have an excellent and highly endowed hospital in the wr
tropolii for and an attractive canine cemetery in the suburbs,
There are capital yachts and private for travel*
airplane^ and flying heroes* dc luxe ears* princely In the
West where liberal barbecues arc the fashion, and in ifir m
museums! collections and the of Old
horses, racingsPalm f teach and the tth&ndtin of in war
for profit; even expensive univcniiticit for the of
thing that for the ari*. Hit! for the of
immediately related thought (a* far ai the of
necessary cultural go) the iron infci
The slow, cm* till*
itruction from the np f thi dbci itoi
Imply lick of for the by
their own but on the the fur
and the they
Witeeii the nt! t*C itic
i let's **y by the of the
THE AMERICAN BACKGROUND 31
departments, the English departments in the lead, in the American
universities* The tremendous opportunities under their noses have
not attracted them- One would think that the Physics Department
alone under the same roof might have given an inkling of the
revolutions in theory and practice that had taken place during- the
last hundred years, the fundamental., immediate nature of the in
vestigations necessary, on the ground, and that this would have
started them thinking and into action. Instead, they have continued
to mull over the old records, gallivanting back and forth upon the
trodden-out tracks of past initiative, in a daze of subserviency and
impotence*
Subserviency is the correct term; for the power of wealth, which
by endowments makes the university and its faculty possible, at
the same time keeps that power, by control of salaries and trustees 1
votes, in order to dictate what those who teach must and must not
say* And the teachers submit to it. And thus the higher is suborned
by the lower branch of the cultural split-off, another evidence of
how i he coercion b applied. The teachers must not venture* Thus
they lie, except again in technological branches, the good fortune
of those H|uriumi descendant* of Ben Franklin, gelded.
In the same ncmc* for writers, the official magazines have been
a positive plague.
The truly pathetic of Frank Munsey leaving his money,
whic.lt he made by capitalizing writer** to the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, while the difficulties of a Iciail realization were so patently
evident in the difficulty of valuable books published, etc*
etc., was a ic* knock 'em cold- Maybe he had an idea that
that wan the best way to dispose of the itttfl* the best way to for
ward itttll|fmjits c(fct"4iy hi* contempt for it. In any StiegUtas
didn't fed that way- -i n his sphere- Realizing the fullness and color
in, French painting^K'ertatnly cine of the delights o the modern
world~he went directly to work, it real act of praise, by striving
in thai would be or that was comparable
in
ifid cwf It be can ifford to
fir 10 or to foil to have at least for the single
the wealth nf sity* a collection. Its Uiumi*
from the fifth century, must
33 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGUTZ
us humble and raise our aspirations to the heights* But neither can
a region afford not to have lived. It must be understood, while we
are looking, that great art, in all its significance and implications,
in all its direct application to our moment, has used great wealth
merely as an instrument, and that the life and vigor of every primary
culture is its real reason for being.
Those who appeared to have or did have the opportunity to for
ward a true cultural effectiveness in America have too often, backed
by constituted authority, neglected it being content, if anything,
to push their personal programs exclusively. While these others who
had the vision lacked the opportunity, through official neglect, to
establish the basic program*
Not Alfred Stieglitz* Using his own art, photography, he still* by
writing, by patronage, by propaganda and unstinted friendship*
carried the fullest load forward. The photographic camera and
what it could do were peculiarly well suited to a place where the
immediate and the actual were under official neglect. Sdeglitz in
augurated an era based solidly cm a correct understanding of the
cultural relationships; but the difficulties he encountered both from
within and without wore colossal. He fought them clear-sightedly.
The effect of his Hfe and work has been to bend together and
fuse, against whatever resistance, the split forces of the two neces
sary cultural groups: (i) the local effort, well understood in defined
detail and (a) the forces from the outside*
WUUUA&C CARLOS
II. THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR, New York shared its intellectual distinc
tion with Boston, its industrial place with Philadelphia, and
its commercial supremacy with Baltimore and New Orleans.
Though it had become the mouth o the continent, thanks to the
Erie Canal, it was not yet the maw. After the Civil War, despite
the energetic rise of Chicago, New York City became an imperial
metropolis, sucking into its own whirlpool the wealth and the
wreckage of the rest of the country and of the lands beyond the sea.
When Dickens first visited America, voracious pigs rooted in the
streets of Manhattan. Less than a generation later, through the holy
transmutation o war, most of them were turned into financiers and
industrial enterprisers, and they confined their operations to Wall
Street, where the troughs were deep and the wallow good* Poets
stockbrokers; Pan took a flier in railroad securities; satirical
humoriflts hobnobbed with millionaires and turned the lance of
their purely legendary kings, of driving their
through the middle of the real the Cooki, the Vtnder-
bilts, the the New York had become the
of a furious decay, which was called growth and enterprine
and The foul to form; the
the body of the city to be distended; the disteodon was
So the city grew* Brownitonc mansions, often grotesquely
ornament. Into position Fifth
tad In solid row% lined
the tide it the city rapidly northward, On either
ride of In the the new tenements* with
in the iftd duity vestibules where, in the
II
34 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
seventies, a row of pitchers would be exposed through the night, to
be filled with milk in the morning. The crosstown traffic became
less important, as the rivers ceased to provide the main entrances
to the city; but the tangle o wheels on the avenues thickened:
shafts interlocked, hubs scraped, horses reared, presently a bridge
was built over Broadway for the pedestrian. The vivacious dangers
of congestion had all appeared: exasperated drivers exchanged oaths
as deadly as bullets, and gangsters, lining up for fights on the
dingier side streets, exchanged bullets as lightly as oaths. Reject able
folk hunched their shoulders, lowered their heads, and hyjwoti'/ed
themselves into somnolence by counting sheep: at all events the
population was increasing.
Beer saloons, four to as many corners In of the city*
brought together in their more squalid form* the ancient of
hunger and tore and politics: 4l free lunch, 19 "ladies' entrance/ 1 ami
the political boss and hi$ underlings. The duty of the
was to protect vice and crime aadl to levy a tax
in whatever offensive It a*
ts InteUigmce, Whisky and ruled the wits and the
life of the city: whisky for aid for
befuddlemeat Barber shops specialised, until the century,
in painting out black that did not yield to the cold iron of the
lamp-post The swells of course drank their wine convivially At,
Martial or Ddmonico's; but that was an far from the
as Newport or Narragansett were from Coney Island. In the Que
ries Messrs. McEIm, Mead* and While to the city
for the more polished they the Century CluK
Gorhatn f s> Tiffany's, Dclmonico's* and many tn tiir city
for the new Borgios and But these cultural nf
course remained from the principal buildings nf the
the tenement and the The brown front cif the
with the swinging and the ami rlie
ing the and the lift-
by for two w the
law that the to
la tiht am! for am!
miles, on tide of iron
so built
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 35
houses were planted. Thousands of people lived under the shadow
o the elevated, with the smoke of the old-fashioned locomotives
puffing into their windows, with the clank and rattle causing them
to shout in daily conversation to overcome the roar outside. The
obUviousness to low sounds, the indifference to cacophony which
makes the ideal radio listener o present-day America, was part of
the original acquisition of Manhattan in the Brown Decades, This
torment of noise troubled sleep, lowered waking efficiency, depleted
vitality; but it was endured as if it were an irremediable fact of
nature. In the lull o the elevated's thunder, the occasional tinkle
of the cowbells of the ragman on a side street, or the solemn
/i /~/-~ / ctuf do's of the second-hand clothing buyer, would have
an almost pastoral touch; while Carmen, on an Italian's clanking
hand organ, could splash the sky with color.
Within the span of a generation, the open spaces and the natural
vistas began to disappear. The older beer gardens, like Niblo's
Garden, gardens that had frequently preserved the trees and open
space of a whole block, were wiped out: only in the further reaches
t>( the city did they remain, like Untcr clcn Linden on upper Broad
way! ami like the roatUiouscs which dotted the more or less open
country that remained cm the Wat side above U5th Street until
the cud of the century* The rocky base of* Manhattan! always unkind
to life, steadily lost its filament o soil The trees in the streets
more infrequent a* the city grew; and their leaves grew
near before autumn Even the Boulevard above Skty-
fifth which the Tweed had planted Broadway
for hii own pecuniary Ixmefit, its to the
first, subway; while only the ailanthui tree, quick growing lean
living, kept the back yards occasionally to the lonely
young men and women from the country* who their first
in the city from bull bedrooms on the tup-floor rear of un-
houses. And as the city it grew away from
Its old one of the kit of to prove more reminiscent
f the old anticipatory of the new, was the Market,
with ill tower* at Elgkh Vanishing from
the tti the open markets that
had the of the soi and the country to its
36 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
connecting farmstead and city home by means of little boats that
plied the Hudson and Long Island Sound,
the waterfront kept a hold on the city, modifying its character^
longer than the countryside did. The oyster stands remained on
South and West streets; and "mast-hemmed Mannahatta 1 * was still
an accurate description up to the end of the 'nineties: Alfred
Stieglitz has indeed recorded for us the bowsprit of aa old sailing
vessel, thrust like a proud harpoon into the side o our Leviathan*
But most of the things that had made life pleasant and sane in the
city, the old houses, red brick, with their white doorways and deli
cate Georgian fanlights, the friendly tree-lined streets, the salty lick
and lap of the sea at the end of every crosstown street, as Melville
described it in the opening pages of Moby Dick-~all these things
were disappearing from the eye, from the and touch* and m
from the mind,
The water and the soil, as the prime environment of life,
becoming "immaterial," that is to say, they of no use 10 the
canny minds that were promoting the
be described in a document, quantitatively! and
verted ultimately into cask A farm for the a
place that might be converted into building lots: in that process,
indeed* lay the meaning of this feverish growth, this anxious specu
lation* this reckless transformation, of the quick into the
People staked out claims 00 the farther parts of the city in the way
that prospectors stake out claims in a gold rush. There wa*
the chance that of in
the course of the city's growth* a mind That In the
atmosphere of magic, the to get for
a whole population hoped and and lived. That In
the environment was unfit for In the
did not concern, the ruleti
the city, nor did it the that
touch; their the
the reality, they fed on the of Mr*
Mr* Pulitzer 1 !, and Mr.
The tud the the and the
journal* the 06
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 37
hopes, and paper lusts, the world of sudden fortunes on paper and
equally grimy paper tragedies, in short, the world of Jay Cook and
Boss Tweed and James Gordon Bennett, had unfolded itself every
where, obliterating under its flimsy tissues all the realities of life
that were not exploitable, as either profits or news, on paper. Events
happened to fill the paper that described them and to provide the
daily titillation that relieved a commercialized routine. When they
came reluctantly, they were manufactured, like the Spanish-Amer
ican War, an event to which Newspaper Row contributed rather
more than statesmanship did.
Behold this paper city, buried in its newspapers in the morning,
intent through the day on its journals and ledgers and briefs and
Dcar-sir-in-reply-to-yours-of-even-date, picking at its newly invented
typewriters and mimeographs and adding machines, manifolding
and filing, watching the ticker tape flow from the glib automatons
in Broad Street, piling its soiled paper into deep baskets, burying
Its dead paper in dusty alphabetical cemeteries, binding fat little
dockets with red tape, counting the crisp rolls and bank notes, cut
ting the coupons of the gilt-edged bonds, redeemable twenty years
hence, forty years henec f in paper that might be even more dubious
than the original loam issue* At night? when the paper day is over,
the city buries itself in paper once more; the Wall Street closing
prices* the Five Star Sporting Extra, with the ninth inning scores,
the Special Extra, Att*abQut4k&Kg*figAt, all about the anarchist
in St Pctersburg~or Pittsburgh*
The cult of paper bringi with it Indifference to sight and sound;
print and arithmetic are the Bible and the of this religious
ritual. Realities of the world not included In this religion become
dim unreal to both the priests and the worshipers; pious
New Ycirkeri live in a world of Nature and human tradition* as
indifferent to the round of the and to the delights of the
and the deeper stores of social memory as an early
occupied with hit devotions amid the splendid
of a Acropolis* They collect pictures as they collect
o it merely a premature engrav
ing o It Is not the or the thoughts*
but die of in the newspaper, that justifies
The it built on a foundation o
38 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
printed paper; it is cemented together by paper; it is crowned with
paper. No wonder the anarchists, with more generous modes of
life in mind, have invented the ominous phrase: "Incinerate the
documental" That would wreck this world worse than an earth
quake.
Beneath this arid ritual, life itself, attenuated but real, starved
but still hungry, goes on. Lovers still become radiant and breath
less; honest workers shave wood rivet steel beams, dig in the
earth, or set type with sure hands and quiet satisfaction; scholars
incubate ideas, and now ami again a poet or an artist brood* by
himself in some half-shaded city square. In rebellion against this
arid and ugly new environment, some country-bred person, a
William Cullen Bryant or a Frederick Law Olmsted, would attempt
to preserve faltering rural delights s a picnic here* a park
there. Just before the Civil War the building of
and despite the raids of political the in
decent robbery of the Tweed like the
political of our own day-* ol woa our,
not merely carved out, but actually Improved, goat
pasture tad ihaatydom into a ccraely park.
Meanwhile, the city as t whole foul.
In the late 'seventies the new model tenement that for fhc
so<tlled dumbbell apartment^ the habitation* of the
workers on the lowest level^ for twenty
the erection of tenements ia which only two In six or
got direct sunlight or a modicum of air. Even the hot
wore grim, dreary, genteelly fusty. II was at l*t
achieved for the rich IB the eighteen nineties* on
and Went End Avenue* it in
years aod was replaced by cangeiiiciii*
During the we arc at, the <rf Alfred
birth and and we are umfromcd
with t city on in own For York it*
and Its taut, life u
a i
in jcip, than it hail the;
% ititjif the of a fine
the t ay wii dbie io in
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 39
paper figments. It threw open its doors to the Irish o the 'forties, to
the Germans of the 'fifties and 'sixties, later to the Italians, and to
the Russians and Jews of eastern Europe: the outside world, con
temptuous but hopeful, sneering but credulous, sent many of its
finest children to New York. Some of them pushed on, to the
cornlands, the wheatlands, the woodlands, the vinelands, to the iron
mines, the coal mines, the copper mines; while those that remained
were forced to huddle in utmost squalor. But the congested East
Side, for all its poverty and dirt, was not the poorest part of the
city: it still had its open markets with their color, its narrow streets
with their sociability and their vivid common life and neighborly
help, its synagogues with at least the dried remnants of a common
vision*
This New York produced the elevator apartment house at the
end oi the 'sixties, and the tall building, called the skyscraper after
the topmost sail of its old clipper ships, a little later; and it used
these new utilities as a means o defrauding its people o space and
light and sun, turning the streets into deep chasms, and obliterating
the back yards and gardens that had preserved a humancr environ
ment even when people drank their water, not from the remote
Croton River, but from the Tea-water Pump.
The spirit o pecuniary prick was reckless and indiscriminate; it
annihilated whatever stood in the path of profit. It rained the ruling
as well as their victims* As time went on it became ever
more positive in its denial of life; so that in more elegant parts of
the Side today there are splendid "modern** that are
built to even la than the
on Cherry Street. This this suicidal
vitality* the very o the city that
the Civil War, and to bloom in the the
World War. it in its final manifestation^ a German
o wrote; Diet it* die H&lk t und der Ttttfel wot der
mid ii they survived in this environment,
did of sort of or
They to for their withered
by en the oi this metro
life: how and from California
and to how bathtubs ami sanitary
4 o AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
plumbing offset the undimimshed dirt and the growing tendency
toward constipation, how finally the sun lamps that were bought by
the well-to-do overcame the lack of real sunlight in these misplanned
domestic quarters. Mechanical apparatus, the refinements of scien
tific knowledge and of inventive ingenuity, would stay the process
of deterioration for a time; when they failed, the jails the asylums,
the hospitals, the clinics, would be multiplied. Were not these thriv
ing institutions too signs of progress, tokens of metropolitan intelli
gence and philanthropy?
But in the end, the expectation of health and wholeness, like the
expectation of honesty and justice, tended within the great me
tropolis to disappear. In the course of its imperialistic expansion the
metropolis, as Patrick Geddes put it, becomes a megalopolis, con
centrating upon bigness and abstract magnitude the numerical
fictions of finance; megalopolis paraiitopolis, dominated by
those secondary pecuniary that live on the livintg; and
paraiitopoiis gives way to patholopolii, the city thai
to function and so becomes the prey o all manner of
physical, social* moral. Within a town, and corruption
are normal processes; the part ol the population the
animus of the criminal, applauds htm when he with if, 11
and condones his crime when he is caught red*handed The city
that has good words for its Commodore Vandcrbilts and Tweed*
and Crokers, to say nothing of contemporary gamblers mid shyster*
who have practised on an even larger which multiplied these
antisocial types a thousand times, Is a city In which a
social life, without elementary probity or public has
normalized into the accepted routine*
So every profession has it* racket; every his price. The
matcher and the and the insurance fixer and ftte
testimonial writer have their counterparts in the higher of
the The of dishonor become Ittin-
ortblej and and like the jitivjtie toil for
and mi commtm thai they
who
suftd nf kiw and are
m tun
too tfte
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 41
law Is enforced by illegal methods, the constitution protected by
unconstitutional practices; vast businesses are conducted in "peace"
by judicious connivance with armed thugs now passive black
mailers, now active strikebreakers whose work proceeds under the
amiable eyes of the very agents supposed to combat it. No one
believes that the alternative to living with honor is to die with
honor; it is easier, it is more comfortable, to live sordidly, accepting
dishonor,
In such a city, an honest man looms high. He is a lighthouse on
a low and treacherous coast. To attain even a human level becomes,
in this megalopolitan environment, an arduous, almost a super
human, task
Any fair picture of New York must confess the underlying sor-
didness, of a large part of its preoccupations and activities. It is not
that manufacture and shipping and the exchange of goods are neces
sarily antivital or antisocial processes; quite the contrary. But when
these activities become central to life, when they arc themselves per
verted to serve chiefly a$ instruments in an abstract accountancy of
profit and power, the human hierarchy of values is displaced; and,
us in Home perversion of the physiological functions, the head be
comes cretinous* and the subordinate members become gigantic and
ufcletf* What I have elsewhere called a purposeless materialism
became the essential principle of the city's life*
One must not flinch* then, from recognizing the dark elements
of the picture* But one would have no true image, in fact, no image
at slli if one forgot to add the light that defines and relieves the
shape; and even at its worst, dements were always
present* There is, to with, the physical magnificence of the
the and curve of the bay, the grand spaciousness of
the river, the rhythm of the tides that encircle it f the strike o its
as they crop out in the park or the temporary
arid itmtlly, the proud upthrust of the Palisades them-
In the very of the island is something tight, lean,
a to the till of Long Island, with its fat
Dutch its ill beds* The
their have not diminished those posi*
tite in upthruit: they are almost as geometric
4 3 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
as gypsum crystals. And before the skyscrapers were built, from
Brooklyn Heights, from the Palisades, from the Belvedere In Central
Park, from Morningside Heights, one could see and feel the hard
flanks of Manhattan*
Above all, there Is the sky; pervading all these activities is the
weather. The sharp crystalline days of early autumn,, with Intense
blue sky and a few curls o cloud, drifting through space like the
little jets of steam that were once such characteristic outlets of; the
older skyscrapers: the splendors of sunset on the waters, over
the Palisades, crossing the Brooklyn Ferry* looking toward the Jersey
shore from the Brooklyn Bridge; the swift, whiplike changes from
heat to colds from fog to clarity, from the sharp jeweled contours
of John Bellini to the soft tones of Whistler and Fuller. Qccanion*
ally, too, the sulphurous hell of the dog days* to whip up appetite
for the clank clouds in the wot and the oi lightning
and the drenching showers. At the other the and
quiet o a city quenched by snow; the ol in the
eightcm-ninictic^ the cold ol oa the
twenty years later*
The niggling of the day to a of
fundamental beauties; but they could not them* Nature
remained, ready to nourish the first who opened lull
md breathed in the air~-the clear, slightly salt-laden air* wings
swooping and circling through it This air this
sunlight arc no small encouragements to the And
the landscape as a whole has definition* a disciplined tines the
ran as due north and south as the points of the and the
very of the island* once have by ttte
hands of into iliarp lines* like the of a Dutch canal.
No matter how the confusion cm the *urf*icc% lr ttotttt it all,
in the is order: no how m.tn'* uji
layer, the foundations are If the arc k tltr
of the *if if the and are
dirt, with the of the or the Ii
the cif salt in the first that the
The cold sen fug In in tit
calli one 10 the as is thr
KMT of the cite iti ilit
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 43
out to sea. So the ocean and the sky and the rivers hold the city
In their grip, even while the people, like busy ants in the cracks
and crevices, are unconscious o these more primal presences, save
when they read a report in the morning paper, and reach for an
umbrella, an overcoat, a fan.
Along with its great landscape, New York has had its men. Even
in the worst periods of the city's deterioration, there has always
been a saving remnant, that handful of honest souls whose presence
might have saved the Biblical cities of the plain.
There was, for one, Walt Whitman himself, "of Mannahatta a
son/* whose visits to the city, with even occasional public appear-
ances, continued after the Civil War, and whose brief pictures of
the city are precious records of its life. Whitman, who had rambled
about every part of the city, who knew it coming inward from his
native Huntington, from Coney Island when that spot was just a
fishing hamlet, from the rocky wilds of the upper part of the
island, where he would go walking with Bryant Whitman knew
the city at its best. While he realised the evil significance of so much
of its vitality* and the impoverishment o its wealthsee his de
scription of the fashionable parade in Central Park in 'seventy-nine
he was nourished by it and fed steadily on, it, opera, theater,
bookstalls* libraries^ lecture halls; above all* the million-headed
throng oft the
Drinking at PfaflPi, loalug on the Fifth Avenue with the
drivers, the Brooklyn Ferry, Whitman had caught
iti the common life that was and permanent He
who really the soil of Manhattan and the pavement of New
York touches* whether he knows it or not f Walt Whitman. Be*
the o the commercial lite there was in New York
a spirit In those who like Whitman, tad
were well rooted in the provincial soil* this spirit was
out for that were still foreign to the
philosophy of and Schopenhauer* the
of Ciriyle the 01 Michelet and Hugo
to our unfinished landscape. Melville, who
had i tad Whitman a common printer and
not by the bourgeoisie and debased into
44 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
accepting their prudent paper routine. Both of them were capable
of a passionate aristocracy that reserved for the spirit its primacy
in the affairs of men. Whitman's democracy was the prelude to a
broader-rooted aristocracy, and none knew that fact better than he,
The Roeblings were in New York, too, during the 'sixties, ami
Washington remained on, though an invalid, until the Brooklyn
Bridge was finally completed in 1883, Not alone did they compose
the poem of granite and steel that is the Brooklyn Bridge* one of
the first of those grand native works of art that Whitman had
demanded of the sayers and delvers, but they brought that arduous
habit of intellectual exertion, that capability for heroic sacrifice on
behalf of immaterial things, that strict obligation to selMiscipHnc^
which came directly from the great Germany of Ksmt and G<*ethc
and Hegel, a Germany the elder Roebling-* who was a pupil of
Hegel'sso well knew* It was right for a New Yorker who watt
interested in science or engineering to Berlin during thin
period; so that even though was the fact
he was following In the of the who built
the bridge* It was as natural for Mm 10 go 10 Berlin It was for
Louis Sullivan, a little earlier, to follow the of
to the Ecole dei Beaux Arts in Paris.
Though none of the new building! in New York could compare
m beauty with the High Bridge, in it$ original form* or wtflt
the Brooklyn Bridge, there was & stir la architecture in the
and 'nineties, due chiefly to the work of Richardson* influ
ence remained even though he his
Island to Boston* with the De Vinne cm
Lafayette Street, an excellent fur a and
craftsmtnlikc master of printing, the of
architecture were the of loft and and
that in the
stone round, and subtle brickwork iet a thai few later build*
ingt
the ?ary best Europe in this at, the
tnd of
and this.
was Ryder, the llie
m0si that In after the war,
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 45
worthy companion in the spirit to that other post-war recluse, the
author o Moby Dick. If the bold sunlight of Broadway made its
sheet-iron buildings look flimsy and unreal, the moonlight of
Ryder's inner landscape gave body to reality; Ryder with his in
tuitions of human destiny, Death Riding around a Racetrack, with
his wistful melodies of love, the vision of Perette, Siegfried and the
Rhine Maidens, with his presentation of fate in the little boats with
a tiny sheet of sail on a broad moonlit sea, to which he so often
returned, this mystic had a strength and a purpose that the
ephemeral activities of the outer world did not possess. A benign
figure, ranging up and down the streets after dark, penetrating life
in its stillness and peace more bravely than those who flung them
selves into the noisiest corners of the battlefield, Ryder also became
part of the soil of Manhattan. No one can be aware of the rich
vitality of the city who does not know its Ryder as well as its
Whitman* He needed little from the city; he gave back much.
The problem for the creative mind in the 'nineties, whether he
was a young writer like Stephen Crane or a young man with a
passion for photography like Alfred Stieglitz, was to face this New
York of boundless misdirected energy and to capture a portion of
that wasteful flow for his own purposes, using its force without
accepting its habitual channels and its habitual destinations. But
there was still another problem: and that was to conquer, with
equal radiation, the gentility, the tepid overrefiaemcnt^ the academic
inertness tad lack of passionate faith, masquerading as sound judg
ment, which characteristic of the fugitive culture of the
The that prevailed were worse than
no at all: technique% dead forms of
worship* cut I morbid shadow on every enterprise o the mind,
mind a sham! causing vitality to somehow
To put the choice with the crudest possible emphasis, the
for the creative mind was how to avoid the with
out Into the
Now f the century, forces were at work
in the world* who the tight of the eighteenth
century or the turbulence of the seventeenth century only
tad when they belittle these
thqy old patterns and worked
46 AMERICA AND ALFRED ST1EGLITZ
creatively on unfamiliar lines. But if the artist was to become a force
in his own right once more, as confident o his mission as the
scientist or the engineer, it was important that he should not
identify himself with the senseless acts of imperialist conquest, or
with the senseless mechanical negation o life. When I use the word
senseless I use it in both its usual meaningsfirst, foolish and
stupid, and on the other hand, without benefit o the senses, shut
off from the experiences that come through the eye, the ham!, the
ear, the nose, the touch of the body. For the weakness o the me
chanical ideology that had put itself at the service of capitalism
and that colored even the minds that rejected it was that it hud
limited the provinces of the senses, and confined its operations to a
blind world of matter and motion.
Following partly from this mechanical philosophy partly from
the new routine of industry* the in fact and
defeated in aU the new industrial not in
New York, which. line and the of
tie Western continent To t in this this city.
It was accessary to up all the of human
caqpertfinae: to sharpen the eye, quicken the touch, the
of smdl tad as a preliminary to restoring to the
dwarfed tad amputated personalities that had teen produced the
Gradgrinds, the M'Choakumchtlds* the Bouncicrbys. In it world
where practical success canceled every other aspiration* this meant
a redoubled interest in the ami methods ihuc challenged the
canons of pecuniary success contemplation anil idle
eraftsmanship and patient manipulation* a of
the emotions and an enlargement of the a
the to i of
power to the more
lymboEzed in love: an on the oC
a on the of
In the Gita, says thai the way to
tibn be as well as tinif
ire directly 10 and the lift,
it was by by one of the Sue
that hid by the and the thai
oa to in the p*
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 47
preached tlie world around him and helped restore those values
that had been left out of the narrow Wdtbild of his contemporaries.
While Stkglitz, through his very use o the camera, allied himself
with the new forces at work in the world, he did not, like those
who have denied their own humanity, become smaller through his
use of the machine. For mark this: only those who live first and
who keep alive have earned the right to use the machine. Those
who use machinery because they are incapable of facing the stream
of life and directing it, those who seek order in automatons because
they lack the discipline and courage to achieve order in themselves,
become the victims of their instruments and end by becoming mere (
attachments to a mechanical contrivance. Not so with Stieglitz:
from the beginning the machine was as subordinate to his human
direction, through his understanding o its potentialities and capaci-
tics, as is the breathing of a Hindu guru. When used thus, as part
of man's organic equipment rather than as a substitute for a de
ficient organ, the machine becomes as integral as the original eyes
or legs. Assimilating the machine in this fashion, Stieglitz was
armed to reconquer the lost human provinces that had been for
feited by the one-tided triumph of the machine,
In the surviving photographs of Sucglkz's early discovery of
New York with the camera, one h conscious at first chiefly of his
tuitl resolute approach to the outward aspects of the city that
had been regarded m "unpatntobta" and therefore! in a fashion, as
unusable* He the of the on a horse car in
a iiiciwitcirtn; he at a row o ugly browMtonet or hovers
t of railroad in a railroad yard, with the loco-
puffing magnificently at the iky. In Mi in
he Is 011 a pur with who used paiat t his
moiium* photography, Thomas Eakias: but his
it broader, his leu traditional. does mt>
like bis ctmtempurary, the city from morning
10 i dkKumeittary history of its life,
the oC Zola. He not he waits; he
he ol the city he touches only
by of the pitchblende, he ex-
the 01 which for the stra nge
of the
48 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
There are many parts of New York that Stieglitz Ignores or
leaves no record of, parts of it that have not entered his life or
nourished him; there are other parts of his experience, like the
grand spectacle of the horse races, which mean much to him and
still are preserved only in a print or two* It is not for lack o love
or Interest that the epic of New York is not caught by his camera,
chapter by chapter, as it unfolds from the 'nineties onward;^ to
seize this was indeed part of his conscious intention. Bui the point
is that it is not the document but the life that made it poftsiblc that
he searches for and holds to: and as Emerson aays, the essential
fact is unaltered by many or few examples. If one doubt* Stieglit/.**
awareness of the deeper transformation* of feeling and thinking
and acting that took place in his metropolis one neat only examine
his photographs more carefully. The external in the city
itself was profound Within the darkened of the financial
district, people lost their of day and just at they lci
the occasional glimpse of the iky which the
bearable, In the new subways they lost the of the tuft
over the roof tops of Manhattan* which had from
the ramshackle Nature in its simple farm, the
wonder of the morning and the night, was from the metro
politan routine; and therefore I say "therefore 11 re
actions are rarely accidents these In
Stieglitz*$ photographs with a new force.
The chief instrument of photography Is light*, and the fact
Stieglitx always worked by natural light, by
with its studied arrangements and its to If att
important one. But all the of the to
him: so he the first night that
cance. The weather, is an im|xrttmt element for his :
hence, too, he the first in in rain. He
not have to to the country to find any
thin he hat to to to find in the way ilwt
the art of the the
and the 411
In life itlll in the city, had
the o and Just m
to be in tie lad Hi tree ami hi*
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 49
patcH of slcy, so Stieglitz found the necessary germs of a living
environment even in a metropolis that had lost the most rudi
mentary sense of the soil, and was turning itself, step by step, block
by block, into a stony waste.
During the nineteen hundreds, too, the city was losing its sense
of the rivers, despite the extension of Riverside Park. For sewage
pollution had driven the North River shad away and made all
other kinds of fish that might be caught noxious; so that the old
gaffers with their set-lines and bells had disappeared from the
Hudson, along with the groups of happy naked swimmers, and
another link with nature was broken, even as, because of pollution
from the oil-burning steamers, the waters of the Lower Bay lost
the bluefish and weakfish that had once been so plentiful there,
But Stieglitz, not less than Whitman, preserved the sense of the
waters surrounding Manhattan, He photographed the ferry boats
coming into their slips, the boatload of immigrants, the skyline of
Manhattan from the Jersey shore, with the water establishing a
base in the foreground. Water and sky come into his pictures, again
and again: the river, the occan the bathing beach, the rain, the
snow> and finally, dominating the whole landscape in every sense,
the clouds* Shut out by the tall buildings, shut out by the dark
court! of the new apartment houses, the very stars at night put at a
distance by the myriad lights of the city, flaring, as Tennyson said,
like a dreary dawn the sky remains under all conditions the
essential reminder o nature and the cosmos. In the course of
owtt development* the iky becomes a more and more
part of his pictures; and finally* it becomes the symbol
whereby Stieglitz unites his sense of the universal order with the
o the personality, as developed in the relations of men and
women*
In the pavement of the city there are crack$* And out
of the f0il between cracks, a few blades of will
or show, whose are borne by the birds; here, even,
the of i tree will take root and spring up if no foot disturbs
it. It is in the between the building i that Sticglit% finds
the iky 5 it is in the surviving in the pavement that Stlcgiitz
his tad in his pictures of the city, so
far the and the obduracy of its
5 o AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
stones, he emphasizes the presence of life. One of the most moving
and impressive pictures he ever made was that of a little tree in
Madison Square Park, young and vernal in the rain, with a street
sweeper in the foreground and the dim shape of a building in the
background; the promise of life, its perpetual reawakening and
renewal* are in that print.
Wherever Scieglitz turns his head in this city* he looks for the
touch of life, seizes it, emphasizes it; and by this means he sets
himself in opposition to those who would glorify the negation of
life and sanction its subordination to metropolitan businas, ma
terial concentration. Meanwhile, all the forces of urban aggrandize
ment are on the make: advertising* insurance, and high finance,
the divine trinity chat rules the world of industry and perverts its
honest labors for its own ends, gather together in the city and 0111 of
its egotism and self-inflation rose higher and first
in the southern end of the Mtadi then, a tort of
vertebral column, Thirty-fourth in the
central district. The new and are by
apartment homes as impidiy planned* as
as crazily and as as the
themselves. The who puerile
strocturct gloated over the of a whole city composed of
skyscraper^ with aftrial drives for the rich, and in the murky
canyons Wow the working and living for the pcwr
artificially lighted! artificially ventilated (-"-a city in which
would be supplied by tunlamp** grasw hy and
presumably, by mechanical incubation. (Nci df
Huxley 1 * satire was beyond the
versation of the aelf-infatuated who aitd
planning and building the "city of the future/* on
A g encradon hit firm of New York,
the city the of an
building tt Fifty-third by the
tad of the He
with no further hint of than the imiuMtion of the
dE the day* itie of am) ilwi
He the
d<y 01 tit the lust state 01 aid
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 51
human insignificance, devoid at last of even the possibility of earn
ing money: financial liabilities^ as well as the social liabilities their
reckless misuse had already made them, There, in effect, is the
ultimate result of putting nature at a distance and subordinating
all the values of living to the paper routine of pseudo-work and
profit-pyramiding. These skyscrapers of Stieglitz's last photographs
might be the cold exhalations of a depopulated world.
And at the end, with a sardonic gleam in his eyes, he photo
graphs the turning point; the tearing down of a seven-story building
at Sixtieth Street and Madison Avenue in order to make way for
a new two-story building* The nightmare was over. The human
scale had begun to return. Finally, the sterile dream of imperialist
conquest externalized itself in that last gesture of the impotent:
Rockefeller Center, But this was already an aftermath, which, like
an auto rolling backward downhill, continued on its course because
the driver preferred the sensation of motion, even if it were motion
backwards* to the recognition of his inability to reverse the direc
tion and go forward.
While the tree and the sky are dominating symbols in Stieglitz's
work, brought to sharper focus by their steady exclusion from the
urban landscape, there arc two others that were important, both in
his personal life and in his vision; the race horse and the woman*
The thoroughbred hone, quivering in every muscle, nostril open*
eyes glaring, hooves delicately stamping* ready for the race or the
rut: symbol o sheer aaimal vitality! bred and nurtured with *
eye tci that final outburst of speed which carries horse and
rider the to victory. From the black heavy-
Wauorboy or the lownAuag, chestnut $y0by
lei the Man o* War and hit preient^day
the of animal achievement; proofs o
and in with the world of life, symbolic
of 01 wheat, new hybrids or *poru In flowers
and was ultimately important to man
than half the nuachanical contrivances on which the metro
politan
tf the vitality* woaan w-4 one may
the* that of spirit which,
the of fulfills itself in the vary
5 2 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
organs of the body, in the warmth o the arms, in the tenderness
that emanates from the breast, in the receptivity of the lap, in the
utilization o every physical fiber for the higher ends of life, making
the body not the enemy of the mind but the friendly guide and
initiator; favoring the warm intellect, touched by the earth, the
intellect of Goethe, as contrasted with the cold intellect, the intel
lect divorced from the earth, the intellect of womanless men like
Leonardo, Man tends to overvalue his eyes and his muscles: the
organs of definition and of physical conquest* Woman teaches ^him
to use his lips, his sense of touch, and to diffuse some of the ^fierce
tactile sensitiveness that is at first concentrated so exclusively in his
generative organ. Here is a vitality even deeper-fibered than that of
the thoroughbred horse; for it reaches, through the very structure
of woman's body, toward a completer biological fulfillment, never
being fully organized or alive except when the lead,
through the lover or the baby t to the and womb. ^
The masculine world, with its o with Its stulti
fying ambitions to comer wheat or to to this
or that substitute for organic life> to conquer by an or a
formula this or that territory of the Intellect, this world*
particularly m our own cultural epoch^ has toward ait
asceticism that km left little energy or time for the fundamental
biological occupations. The iced was and fruitful: the
outburst of vitality marked by the rising birth rate of the nineteenth
century proved it: but the soil was too dry and and in
humus to give the plane itself lull growth. So that k was the
at the periphery of our mechanical civilization, the
serious people, the unbusinesslike^ the and and
sports, the "low** md the "vicious/* the who still
preserved an alert eye appreciative of the flanks and and
of a hone, or the flanks and belly and buttocks of a woman.
Compare the and the race track*
both are mainly and humanly they are
low of activity. But one is It is In it
jumble of by of a of
the with the the
mud and and
arc as
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 53
activity is held outdoors under the sky; the track, heavy or fast,
is affected by accidents of the weather; the gamble has to do with
visible horseflesh and visible human skill and courage; and in the
procession to the post, the suspense of the start, the stretching out
of the field, and the final climax of the home stretch, there is a
superb esthetic spectacle. The drama itself does not terminate
abruptly with the end of the race: the tension is prolonged by the
return of the jockey to the judge's stand, where he awaits for an
instant, with upraised arm and whip, the nod that gives him the
victory in a fairly won race-
D%as came closer than anyone else among the painters to rep
resenting this drama; but there is something, in the four-dimen-
fional continuity of it, that evades even the most skilled of painters;
indeed, the impulse to grasp this continuity was responsible for
the critical steps in the invention of the motion-picture camera. At
the bottom of this interest is the horse himself; and until the auto
mobile usurped this interest, the horse and the gambling connected
with the races were ways in which the American, caught in his
artful commercial merry*go*round, kept a little of his residual sense
of the primitive and the organic. Right down to the end of the first
decade of the present century, the Speedway at xssth Street was
maintained ai a common race track for trotters; and the designer
of Central Park* i generation earlier^ was forced, in the interests of
mcire recreatiooi to plan his hor drives so as to curb
racing-
If did not photographically utilize this interest of
hit in the is, however, the ae print of Going
to the Postit was only perhaps its intensity incom
patible with that patient animation which photog
raphy possible. Stieglitift was too the race horse, as one is too
the lover in ait embrace* to be to photograph him* And
yet the symbolised to him, as it did to the author of St Mamr
to the author of in a later generation, something
in the life of that animal vitality he had too
lightty turned his on and renounced in Ms new mechanical
Set though he never carried out,
it of of the of and mares, of bulls
and in the net o to catch in the brute an
54 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
essential quality that would symbolize the probably unattainable
photograph of a passionate human mating*
Just as the old rural interest in animals could enter the city only
deviously by way o the race track* so sex itself, despite its endless
manifestations, had no central part in the routine of the civilisation
that had reached a mechanical apex in New York* Where $c was
most obvious, in the burlesque houses and musical comedies and
in the murky red-light district, it was also most furtive and shame
faced; a grudging admission, not a passionate conviction; an itch,
not an intensity; a raw piece of flesh flung to a caged animal* who
responded in his reflexes, like a Pavlovian dog, without benefit of
mind. Foreign observers noted that women tended to dominate fhe
pioneer society of America, and to hold its males in nominal sub
servience to ideals of courtesy and chivalry toward! womanhrxnL
But although the traditional scarcity of women in a country
gave woman a privileged position and her a
of travel and a of in
similar in Europe^ the was to widen the
scope of woman it the of her sex life, of
with through her sei, the woman, tier
studious attention to her own beauty, her and her
learned to preserve her freedom and power by keeping sex at a
distance. It was on the assumption thai "nothing could happen"
that the came together 10 easily, and in America*
up to the second of the present century,*
"freedom** 1
And in any fundamental did
the American girl extended her flirtation* to the erf
ing in bed The whole nf sex remained
sexual symbolized or ariphifttieatitm; intkwd* it
ID low as lo justify
and the of children ami driven to seek
they had the of Thin
of sex was than by the of
put ami tfi
i 0f or
In be
into the toil from the of
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 55
Intercourse was also the most dangerous In the possibilities of
serious lesion. If this is still largely true today, a hundred years
after the initial movement toward birth control in America, it was
even more true a generation ago, when the crudeness and uncer
tainty of the various devices used added to the clumsiness and
anxiety that attended their employment. With sex, the dish often
became lukewarm before it could be served; and with the loss
of warmth and flavor went a loss o appetite; for why, if the final
result were favored by lukewarmness, should people ever bother to
reach in the first place a hotter temperature?
Lusty men and passionate women of course remained in this
society; but the whole tone of sex remained practically as low as it
had been in Victorian days. Although talk about sex, and even
possibly physical indulgence, became more common, the actual
manifestations often remained placidly anemic: a girl might have
a dozen lovers without having known an orgasm, or have a dozen
orgasms without having achieved any fundamental intimacy with
her lover, Oa the surface, decorum or the defiance of decorum;
beneath it, irritation, frustration* resentment*- resentment on the
part of the male for the unarousabieness of the female, about whom
the faint of anxious antisepsis clung like an invisible petti
coat; resentment oa the part of the female against die male both
for his bothersome and his lack o really persuasive
In the course o bwiae&s, the work in the office and the
factory, the of the home* the dub, the gathering,
and women saw each other fcoo little on their more primitive
to 11 and find each other. They
by the of drink to tevdb more
qiiicklj^oaly to tone die and o tex when what
wi and leisure and $ympthy tad above all
firet And vitality, for all of which t tuoMtscent animal be*
wii in no a substitute. For what wm left for tar
but the bdbre when til
hid wery ol Mag *ex?
One the of MX its here
Wii to with lymboiic pre$entt-
of the thtt in the around Mm*
A t It he hid his own o
56 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
manliness and sexual confidence reenforced and cultivated by the
great traditions of the arts, above all by Rubens, whose portrait o
H<a&ne de Fourment, an exuberant naked girl wrapped in fur, he
had seen on his first visit to Vienna, at a critical moment when it
had reechoed and eloquently justified the impulses he found within
himself. The health, the animal vitality, the unashamed lushness of
sex in Rubens's paintings, are all as conspicuous as the absence of
these qualities in the unhealthy sentimentality that has hung around
sex in the Western World, since Christianity attempted to transfer
to heterosexual relations the sick moonlight glamour of unfulfilled
yearning that derived ultimately, perhaps, from the romantic homo
sexual love of the Greeks. Rubens was a long step back 10 reality
from the misty mid-regions inhabited by IWs pallid maidens, girls
who were reproduced in paint in the adolescent of George
Fuller's paintings in the 'seventies, and still further in
the popular Dewing ladies who ruled the 'nineties. The maiden
of adolescent America was a tort of inverted pariah; untouchable by
reason of her elevation. In of Nature, her womanliness and
her u0touchability were to be one. But what was sex* how
could it exist, how could it nourish the personality, if it were not
in fact the most essential demonstration of tmichability~*if the inter
course of lovers, ac all its levels, from the intuitions at a distance to
the final of union v were not accompanied ar wry moment
by that direct sense of touch, that tact, which removes the need for
words and signs and breaks down the formidable
object and subject, between thine and mine?
In all the manifold meanings of the adjective, ex wm
the realm of tactile values, Stkglitz was to discover
and intensify them in his photography evrn itcforc Itercnaon tud
used them> too narrowly* as a key tt> the great {Minting of th<?
Italian Remittance. The of love, debased ai a mere
of it indeed one of the of it*
It is blind in the lict that II of
below the open-eyed rationality of It is
in the way that it out the in to ron*
the inner ai in m tit
prtycr; and filially! k has the f
for it to tee with its and to the
THE METROPOLITAN MILIEU 57
reacts more quickly with the other available senses in every region
of the body.
It was Stieglitz's endeavor, at first mainly instinctive, finally,
through a better self-knowledge, with a fuller awareness of his
actions, to translate the unseen world of tactile values as they develop
between lovers not merely in the sexual act but in the entire relation
ship of two personalities to translate this world of blind touch into
sight ? so that those who felt could more clearly see what they felt,
and so those who could merely see might reach, through the eye,
the level of feeling. Observe the work of Stieglitz's contemporaries
in photography, moved perhaps by the same desires but deeply
inhibited. See ? in the many reproductions in Camera Wor\ which
doubtless helped pave the way to the sun-bathing and easier nudity
of a later day see how they portray the nude body. However
honest their efforts, they nevertheless surround the body with a
halo of arcadian romanticism; note how resolutely they equip their
naked models with glass bubbles; how they compel these naked
girls painfully, for the first time in their lives, to pour water out of
narrow-necked jugs; how they lash them to tree stumps or make
them shiver at the edge o icy pools. Sex must be disguised as art
that in, as artincss -before one may peep at it without blushing.
Undisguised, the girl averts her face from the camera, so that the
fteif<onsciou* and self-righteous face shall not acknowledge the
powers of the body* The efforts of these earlier photographers are
not to be but the tantaitang fear of sex a fear of its
heady realities, is written over their pictures, with their dutiful
aversion*! their degrees of dimness* their overarch poses.
It wai Mi manly of the realities of aex, developing out of
his own renewed In love, that resulted in some of Stieglitz's
bctt In a part by part revelation of a woman's body,
in the presentation of a hand, a breast, a neck, a thigh, a
lcg the visual equivalent of the report
of (he or the face as ii travels over the body of the beloved*
Incidentally, this If one of the few of photography that had
not in one or another by the painter! since
the of the Renaissance, which
are purely instruments of
they no appeal to sentiments and feel-
5 8 AMERICA AND ALFRED STTEGUTZ
Ings. In more abstract, yet not in less intimate form, Stieglitas sought
to symbolize the complete range o expression between man and
woman in his cloud pictures, relying upon delicacies and depths o
tone, and upon subde formal relationships, to represent hi* own
experiences. Earth and sky, root and topmost branch, animal
intimacy and spiritual expression these things* which were so
remote rom the routine o the metropolitan world, or which there
existed in such loud disharmony, were restored to their natural
integrity in Stieglitz's life and work. What was central became
central again; what was deep was respected for its profundity* in
stead of being ignored; what was superficial was thrust behind the
essentiaL
StiegMtx was never a better son of the city he loved and identified
himself with than when he turned hi* back on her desiccated
triumphs and recalled, in word, ia photography i*a th*s tenacious act
of existence, the precious dement* that the city i*md excluded. With
Whitman, with Ryder, with the handful of other ea that each
generation has prodticsd its Nw York* Stieglitz has scored his
c&y not by acqutocmg in its gmodio** decay, oar yet by furthering
its creeping paralysis: lie has served it by nurturing in himself,
and ia those who have witnessed his work* the living germs that
may reanimate it, quickening the growth of the higher forms o
life it has excluded. For, as Whitman said, the place where the
great city stands is not the place of markets and stretched wharves
and multiplying population and ships bringing goods rom tibc
ends of the earth : it is the city of the faidhfulcst lovers and friend*.
III. THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM
JULY, 1873,, Guests of the Fort William Henry Hotd at Lake
George are drifting to a comer o the hotel piazza to watch
a knot o small boys at their sports* On a parches! board perched
on the arms o a couple o chairs they have laid out a miniature
race course, and are playing a game of races with tiny leaden horses
on it* Upon certain o their little toys they have bestowed the names
o historic race horses; on others, those of girls; and on a few select
groupi of them* the names of very favorite girls. All have been
divided, for the of: the fun* to represent the constituents of
imaginary managed by the several contestants, and carry
their colors. To the tune of dice shaken from a cup, they
advance about the little field, reenacting famous turf events and
enacting new ones. From time to the eldest of the boy% a
dark-haired, youngiter oocasioaally deserving the nick
name ''Hamlet/* Urn by his mother*! Edwin Booths
adoring friend* t of rides, reviving the excitement
It is he up the The intelligent
include the Governor of New York, fwcdve it
the of a unique, child's world*
The carry their toys to the stall erf the village tlntyper
to The pity insists on arraying hit
on the in an order to himself. And
al the man the in the booth to
the in 1ft what is going on there
the dafk the toy to get permission to
enter If* Th mt o the without Fascinatedly he
the
ft
& AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
On several later occasions he returns to the booth, and on each
he reenters the laboratory. One day he asks the cintypcr the reason
for his application of carmine to the cheeks of his human images*
"Makes 'em look more natural!" the man insists. The nine-year-old
ventures stubbornly to disagree with him.
At two years of age this boy had gotten hold of the photograph
of a beautiful child, a boy cousin, and refused to allow^hirnsclf to be
parted from it. At present he treasures a collection of English racing
journals carrying pictures of famous race horses*
The home from which he springs loves life and believes in the
enjoyment of its gifts and has a genuine, if slightly soft and senti
mental, feeling of beauty and a great friendliness for the human
being*
His father, Mr, Edward Stieglits, is a woolen merchant* At first,
after his migration rom Hanover-Mflndcn to New York City in
1850, Edward Sttcgiitz manufactured mathematical instruments. At
the outbreak of the Civil War he enlisted in the army and became
a first lieutenant. In 1863 he retired from It in order to marry;
and engaging in the woolen trade* promptly attained commercial
success, Solid" and honorable, he contrived at a very early period in
his business career, to persuade the president of the Chemical Na
tional Battle, at this epoch the con&rvdtive ami cfeiirablr
fiduciary in New York City, to advance him a relatively mm
of money over a period of days without collateral other lh*m hi*
personal word* Ai present* in 187^ he can count A. 1** Stewart awl
Marshall Field among hi* cowtant Two ajjo, lie
brought hi* family from Hobokcn, N* JU to live in a
home which he had butlr an Ea Sixtieth iit Yrk
and equipped with ultramodern a*
and piping for water* Sitlli ha*
anything but a andi one not for
him* Ii a child of liberal, life,
fond of of art, of of fine ami
till, well and wry tlit
he with his proud! Iiii ine and
lc the lints a He*
an mid a violinist, ami lie It a
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 61
patient and by no means talentless amateur painter. He also owns
horses and is a member, the only Jewish member, of the New York
Jockey Club; and he infinitely prefers the society of sportsmen and
artists, painters, musicians, and actors, to that of his commercial
associates* At the regular Sunday-afternoon assemblages at his
home, no word of business is exchanged by the company. The
shutters of the dining room are closed early in the afternoon, the
gas is lit, and the group of gentlemen segregated there are informed
that the outside world no longer exists, and that time is infinite
and theirs to enjoy, These pleasant gatherings are frequently at
tended by his eldest son, Alfred, the small boy of the dark room:
indeed, the lad has to perform a function connected with them.
The keys of the well-stocked wine cellar have been confided to
him by a father proud of a son able to assume responsibilities; and
it is the boy's business to bring bottles from below when they are
called for*
And years hence Edward Stieglitz will retire from business.
He will have amassed the sum of $400,000 and perceived that its
Interest, considerable for the period* has provided him with the
means of raising his brood of six, supporting sundry dependent
relative*, and devoting himself to those joys of life which appear
to him its end; painting, esthetic study, horseback, billiards, sport
ing event's* and picture auction the protection of artists and the
cultivation and embellishment of the extensive grounds of the
summer home which he has built himself on the shores of his be-
loved Lake In time, Wall will regain some of his
attention, but only an a means to the end of keeping open
at the Lake: as many as thirty will at times sit down
to table there* Luckily, his liberal of life are as to his
wife* Hedwig Werner, as to himself. Cultured, soft, hospitable,
in nothing the bourgeoise, and basically as simple, as
innocent tnd childlike as her leonine spouse* she is witty, load o
of the company of her family and friends* and Is
an dewnsrer of novels* She as many as a hundred
of and whit it remarkable and indica
tive of an for the concentration of attention
about and an memory, she can recollect
their plots, and distinctly many years after she
62 AMERICA AND ALFRED SHEGL1TZ
has read them; and will continue to be able to do so up to the very
time of her death.
MAY, 1881. KDWARP STOGLm has decided to remove Ws family for
a few years to Europe, to the end o giving all his children the ad
vantages o a Continental education, and his mm Alfred in particu
lar the opportunity of studying engineering at one of the great poly
technics,
Alfred, in the meantime, has grown up an active ingenious boy;
fond of sport. He has taught himself to play billiards mi the pater
nal table and beaten his father at the At nine he lias figured
in a public billiard contest in Boston; but competition him
le$s than the perfection of difficult
At thirteen years, he ran a twenty*fwemilo rice
in about three and a half houri around the of
bis home* The event in ribe of ftie
breaking of the was u o
boys and younger and
and periodioEy the
And he hai all unconsciously a the of
the ultimate salvation flowing en
deavor* aad attraction toward a hidden fint by
the figure of a nimple girl, later by of Helen of Tty s and
last by the feminine principle ia Creadon. by
Alfred has wciaclcring Iy f full on the
parlor floor, turned the of It
for him chiefly at the of the f
Gittchen and the devil He found the and
icriouf* Asd lie hai und will to
the innumerable He hai of ihct
in own
a* it per
htpi the of he hai the
to the love and erf iff
on the it by lie
and on the for th*t its
critic 11 10 And out of the
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 63
the saga of the revolutionary birth o this most noble, humane, and
free of lands, the figure of a hero has beautifully risen before
the lad* This figure is not the immortal George's, but that of Gen
eral Nathanael Greene, sometimes styled the American Turenne
because of the rapidity of his maneuvers, sometimes the American
Scipio Africanus for the reason of his successful attack upon the
enemy on Ms own ground. Greene's merit, in the boy's eyes, flows
from the fact that he had broken the British strength down there in
the South* and had lost few men doing so; from the fact that he had
broken the British strength precisely because he had sacrificed so
few lives in his own army, Greene indeed had won no signal
victories or their shining glories* He was too poor in men and
munitions to risk decisive encounters. But he had invariably retired
from unequal engagements with Ms resources intact, allowing
Cornwall** and the rest of Ms opponents to exhaust their powers
in futile, extended efforts to force the issue. Like Goethe's Faust,
the image o democratic victory gained by the patient conservation
o over a long period, and the willingness to let the enemy
purchase Pyrrhic triumphs dearly, proves endlessly gratifying, *
And, 1877, Alfred Sticglir/, and his brothers have not been
pupils at the Charlier Institute* For reasons of democracy as well
a* economy* they were withdrawn from it and to public school,
with the consequence that Alfred has lost his habits of study. His
at the private institution has enabled Mm to
of his without much work; and
and and the all played with
the of at Mi
During the last he has the City and
it is, Werner of that one of his relatives,
who has that the future of the country
iki In the of and and that it might be
in of the fact that Alfred to have a good
to an of him-
to the grinder that
he Is to with hii family for five years* The old man
For four he ha his hand organ
tftd the arery Saturday
t and first the md then
64 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
the Miserere from // Tromtore. On the first evening he appeared,
Alfred had risen from the dinner table and its hedge of parents,
aunts, brothers^ and sisters; gone into the kitchen and gotten the
cook to give him a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and taken the
food and a dime out into the street. He found a little monkey
huddling on a hand organ, and behind it, turning the crank, an
old gray-bearded Italian. The man courteously thanked him and
made the monkey doff his hat: and after carefully putting the
sandwich in his pocket, continued grinding* And every Saturday
evening since, as soon as the hurdy-gurdy has begun playing,
Alfred has gone to the cook, who has learned to have the sandwich
and the hot drink ready for him> and taken the food and the bit erf
money out to the man. This custom has drawn a comment from
the elders on only one occasion* The night was cold and nowy %
and Alfred* who had gained his man's in a year** lime ami
was very thin happened to wear an variant of the
cadaverous look which periodically hit into
posing Wm tubercular, The soup hid juit is he
rose, his father and mother, of whom frequently re
quests of him, timultanaouily laid* 4l lt f s terribly cold
Woa f t you please drink your while it is hot? 1 * Alfred had not
appeared to hear them, continuing on his way* When he returned,
his parents were silent. Nothing further wan said. Nor will any*
thing further about the incident be said by cither of them for many
yean to come: not until Alfred Is in the fiftie** Thru, cine after*
noon in the course of a ha&serious conversation bttween
and his mother, during which he will* maternally* on the
frequent incomprehensibility of his and cm the
of hii response to by the of hit titter-
she will suddenly, out of a atk him t - *Wo ymi
bcr the night long when it wan to and lather ami I
you for your own to hot, and you
on, fine out to the I'd like to why you
did that* 1
Alfred will reply, w Ma, db you to
Well, 11 let you In on the Do you
know who the waft?"
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 65
She will respond, "I'm glad your brother the doctor is coming. I
think I may have him examine your head."
"I'm going to utt you who the organ grinder really was. / was
the organ grinder!"
4 There you go again, I think you must really be insane!"
"But, Ma, I'm always the organ grinder! I've never given to any
body but Myself!"
Mrs, Stieglitss will lay her sewing in her lap, "How long have
you known this?'* she will inquire.
Alfred will smile and answer, "I've always known it!"
WINTER OF 1882-83. BERLIN. After a year spent as a guest at the
Karlsruhe Realgymnasium, Alfred has registered for a couse in
mechanical engineering at the Berlin Polytechnic, then under the
rectorship of the famous Professor Reuleaux.
Edward Stiegliu has chosen the Berlin Polytechnic for his son
in preference to the Zurich one, for the reason that though both
schools are equally well provided with laboratories and scientific
teacher*, the Swisn is dangerously full of cigarette*$moking Russian
women-students. Still, his parental advice to his son has always
confined itself to two admonitions. One, a counsel fairly regular
among tipper-class fathers, i "Always live within your income!**
The other, less regular, is "Don't ever be afraid to tell the truth 1"
On his way to Berlin, Alfred has stopped off with his traveling
companion, a painter, at Weimar: colored, still, by the letting sun
of romanticism* Princes* 8aynWittg<uisteia lives at one of the
hotels, ami Lun to her rooms daily to play the piano for her*
At the Krbprinx the travelers encountered an old friead of the
painter*^ another artist, who had just returned from Bayreuth
where he has heard all the first performances of Parsifal; and for
that evening Alfred heard him render the new BMknm
0tt the piano. Afc midnight* til rcpiircd to the dwell
ing of old an intimate member of the Lis&t* Wagner
circle. The was by the fact that each of
the in the a bed draped like an altar and
by different feminine mementos. The host solemnly
66 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
informed Mm that each of these couches had been consecrated by
himself to the imperishable memory of that particular one of his
various sublime experiences In which it, individually, figured*
Now, in Berlin, Alfred is having a great time playing billiards,
chess, and, sometimes, cards, at the Caf<$ Bauer; and playing the
piano, seeing something of mixed society, and attending the races,
the theaters, concerts, and the opera. At German universities at this
period, students are not obliged to attend the courses far which
they have registered, or to stand examinations and take their de
grees until they feel inclined to do so. And, in Berlin, an ordinance
places all those tickets for performances at state theaters which have
not been taken up by the public an hour in advance of the curtain,
at the disposal of university students. The tickets cast the scholars
from 50 pfennigs to Mi*^a* Alfred at innumerable per
formances of plays by Shakespeare, Calder^a, Goethe,
Schiller* and by such moderns as and Ai the
he hears his favorites TruAnt and a
apiece*
He is already to lot him
self with Ms modest allowance*
And he has discovered the Russian story for himself: first
Lermoatov, then Gogol, then Pushkin; kit, Turgcncv and Tolstoy*
The realists at first interest him less do their more
predecessors; before long, however* he Is to upon a
novel of Zola's; then, naturalism will stir his depths* The
novel of Zola's which will so profoundly move him ti
Frat, finishing it, Alfred will sit up til it
aloud to his friends* And he will immediately of the
works of the Frenchman who is employing fiction
ti a of penetrating to the the of
life, and will in La df
Un* and of the
of Twain aw
to him for a it is
that of d* of ihit
still Mi
On t day four bit 11 tit
the of i 011 a in tit
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 67
of a shop In the Klostcrstrasse gives him a peculiar little thrill It
Is a small black box, a camera with a single lens. Impelled to enter
the shop, he promptly purchases the simple apparatus.
The sports o life have acquired a small brother. Young Stieglltz
takes a few photographs of the views from his window, of the con
tents of his room, and o some photographs of himself. During the
following winter he registers for and attends a course in photo
chemistry under Prof, H. W* Vogel and appears a dull pupil,
largely for the reason that he takes the instructor's prescriptions
quite literally* He continues desperately laboring at the chemical
cleansing of glass for the preparation of wet plates while the rest
of the class has long since advanced to other problems, unaware that
he has long since learned to clean his glass to the requisite degree.
One of the exercises of the course consists in the photography, for
the purpose of accurately reproducing the contrasting values, of a
plaster Juno draped with a black cloth that stands in the studio.
Sticglitft struggles dcs{xmdcmly to solve the problem, dissatisfied
with each one of his solutions of it To his surprise, the professor
explains to him that the faithful reproduction of the values of the
white bust mid black velvet is impossible; that, as in all things, in
photography* too* compromises are inevitable*
Photographic dry plates have recently appeared IE the market,
vastly facilitating photography; and* realising that he has familiar
ised with the wet Stieglits; acquires a modern
and up the dry plate Suddenly his energies release
the He sets zealously to work
fteif*appointed photographic problems, photographing com-
of the homely city, wails, many, in a$
as a hundred times; till the of the objects trans-
lute satisfactorily into the terms of his medium* He
univerftity in chemistry with photography in view; he
diligently the laboratory dE the Polytechnic for photographic
In of his the regulations limiting
the the arc to the student
ire the to them at all hours
0f the diy and complete responsi
bility for the cif the In Ms he improvises
t by a door towards the wall and
68 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
covering the interjacent space with a blanket Again, he drapes the
blanket over his table and crouches underneath the little tent with
his developer bath and lamp. (These dark rooms are typical of the
ones whose use he will enjoy during most oi his life. He will rarely
have the privilege of a well-equipped laboratory, and never until
1930 possess one o his own that has even the semblance of: com
pleteness* Empty farm kitchens, or bathrooms, will have to content
him*)
The small brother of the other games has swiftly become the
king of them all The pleasures of photography arc curiously deeply
satisfactory. When the enthusiastic young photographer took* at the
image on the plate of his camera, he sees not only the which
his eye beholds, but the image also of what the object* the fine
human being, the lovely woman or child, him feel: some
thing that is life itself in its wonder, laughter, And
not even expression at the piano him at deeply as ihc
act and process of photography* All
an infinite region favorable to photography; with
beauty that has hitherto or by other**
and that the black box tad the chemical and the printing
can catch and hold.
And he is by a curioui certainty that hi* Instruments
will record to his satisfaction everything he now feel*, urn! after
wards will feel, about the world The limit* which sad
wiseacres to it drive him to demonstration* cif the fact,
these limits are arbitrary. He i* told that the camera can photograph
only in daylight; and promptly he him*c!f and hi* camera
into a cellar lit by a weak elect rie lamp and occupied by a tlt;v
used dynamo. He the camera, uncap* the iiinl after
an lasting twenty-four that tic has
a trf the he ii
the to find out how rapidly he can i
sttitl a iti
The hi*
to* the cl he int*
that the
in It in the
In he Ii the ita
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 69
accredited frontiers; obliging it to attack complex problems of
plastic representation. Now already, as later, each of his prints is
the result of a complete consideration of what exposure, developing,
and the quality of the paper can do toward solving the problem
presented to him by feeling. Each is an experiment, the result of
the application of the power and wisdom gained in past experi
ences, to the end of the solution of the new problem. He is already
beginning to make, if necessary, ten, fifty, even a hundred prints of
a negative, for the sake of capturing the vitality he pursues. Like
an inventor, he sometimes works for years on a single problem till
it is solved; and after having gotten a satisfactory print from his
negative, sometimes sets to making it render a feeling latent in it
but unregistered by the earlier proof, and gets as many as ten or
twelve diilerent sensations out of it
A GOOD INKER f EELiNci has gradually been suffusing young Stieglitz.
Since he has set earnestly to work with the camera, he has come to
feel for the first time that he has a right to life, and a right to be
living here in Berlin*
It is the unconscious* the integral sel> that is declaring its satis-
(action to him* In the camera^ the boy of the dark room has finally
a almost perfectly fitted to enable htm to gain the
which he i$ naturally directed.
of the currency, at this very late hour! of much mis-
chievous misunderstanding of the subject, perhaps it will not be
futile or presumptuous o us to point to what appears to us to be
the evident for the affinitiveness o the man and the
machine.
JLet m by indicating to ourselves once more the nature
and of the genius* The genius is one in whom the in-
tuition* the Inward realm of life Itself, the region
of the truth, and to in all men, is powerful,
and 10 an heroic This Intuition is instinct
It is sympathy* it is the aesthetic* sus*
that aski for alone, and desires life for
in nd the lor that object's
70 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLiTZ
It is selfless love; la the words of Schopenhauer; "Perfect objec
tivity; an objective direction of the spirit as opposed to a subjective
one directed towards one's own person and its will. 1 * Or in Goethe's
(Maxims and Reflections); "the capacity to give up otir own
[selfish and limited] existence, so that we may truly exist*'* Since
this intuition spontaneously "places itself back in the object, break
ing down the intervening space" (Bergscm) and "achieving a
sympathetic communication between Its possessor and the rest of
the living, and widening consciousness," it penetrates the region
closed to intelligence unperfectcd by intuition: the region of life, of
the inwardness of matter itself sometimes thai of a single indi
vidual, sometimes that of all individuals in generalthe region
where "all is reciprocal penetration and continual creation/ 1 This it
what Goethe signified in another ol his "Antagonism and
hatred limit the spectator to superficialities even when they are
coupled with intelligence; but if with fraternity
and love, it can penetrate the world and humanity} it can
attain the sublime." For t at the of in*
tuition that i and
tary and of tho and the one: a trf culmination
o the entire universe onto one of Its parts and rii)iiin**-ccti!i
part or approaching"" that* for all their htsuntaticityt the
infinity aad eternity of the whole, And with the tactile* visual or
iuditory* rhythmical symbol* communicated to li
there, 'Ideas" which, for the that intuition is love, it
suffuse* with 'Nvondrous beauty arid worth/ 1 ami
"consecrates and Ilium lacs and into erf Jcty 11
tayana)- < it that ever tad nil!
order, and law of nature: that
can be no sympathetic commutiicotion individuals; nor
can human life perasi* That is what tie
the to the heart; wlmi
he thai was the
of with
with the lie nf
Im had in the erf ilic irf
lees ibit il and lite
iti ttod the of tint
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 71
tain its life and position, through the object's form, seeing the Idea
as it were with the eye, and seeing and feeling with flashlike quick
ness and exquisite sensitivity and subtlety: in the pathway of this
species of genius, we say, events had placed, in the camera, an
instrument capable of being made to record its exquisite visions
accurately in all their original complexity, and with the dew, the
bloomy the intense gleam of the natal moment, still fresh upon
them. Because o its capacity for exceedingly rapid reactions, the
camera can reproduce significant, revelatory shapes in a perma
nent it monochromatic form; the appearances of visible and mobile
objects f as temporary conditions of light model them, with a fidelity
to subtle, ephemeral, complex detail beyond memory's capacity to
hold or the hand's to achieve. It can immediately follow a complex
conception with its expression, fixing the intricate Idea through the
momentary forms which actually reveal it* Veritable attempts to
"photograph" with the means of painting had indeed long ante-
ceded the invention o the machine itself notably those of those
genial revealers through the patient record o visible appearances,
the brother* Van Eyck, and Mctnling. And shortly after the inven
tion of the camera, a partial actualization of its pecuEar potentiality
occurred, at the o the Scots academician David Qctavius
Hill, in collaboration with the chemist Robert Adamson* To secure
the of notabilities for a vart historical paifttlag of the
founding cif the Free Church o Scotland projected by him,. Hill,
in the aet up a atelier, and during
o Edinburgh
and the o their
world In ihii ^okl of
not only the of i&
o but their Interior UfoH&e qua!i
of which he had lounded^
and the tad of pictorial forms,
of hit not only among the
of the bt the world's fine character
weft it die in 1851 and
but the Hill had already
to to Mi doit caxtvas; and
he hid i In Mrs, Cameron,
7 2 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
the veritable exploitation of the individual means of the camera
ceased around 1870. Nor was the fact observed. The potentiality of
the camera was not really felt and understood. Hill's portraits
were scattered. Indeed, the obituary notices of his decease made no
mention of his photographic work; and it was only about 1900
that his negatives were rediscovered by the photographer Craig
Annan, who circulated new and handsome prints of them among
Whistler, Sargent, Leighton, and other artists. As for the work of
the photographers of the immediately succeeding period* it cither,
like that of Nadar, is interesting almost exclusively because of Its
subject matter, or constitutes the results of unnecessary attempts to
imitate painting.
At length the new means encountered its liberator in the keenly
humorous young student developed from the small boy curious
about what went on inside the tintyper's room* The coinci*
dcnce of many forces, apparently, Stieglitz.to the work
demonstrating the photographic medium 1 ! parity with all other
mediums through which man, has Ms of life* He
not only was a genius, with an extraordinarily fine
for the sympathetic peaetration of the true nature of and
the laws of being, deriving a living of order from hit in
tuitions* dlilaterestedt pitying the beautifully for the love of
it, and equipped with an exquisite sensitivity to material He alto
had the capacity for and and with
swiftness and certainty: a trait very possibly intensified by the
American milieu in which he grew; as a having
a tendency to rapid motory and mental to the
of sprinters In all to the that the of
other peoples "come by freight" It I* the fact thai,
technically alone, the the
medium of photography has up to the
by Americans: Whitc t
Kttley, Strand, Coburn, EUy md
Their prims combine tactility with of
viikm* It ii dm that ex
tremely rapid color, h*f
by "the swift American."
natural bent toward the wot
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 73
ably augmented by the circumstance of the inclusion of knack with
machinery, the ability to control natural forces through mechanical
means unassisted by the heavy exercise of the humaan organs, in
the national temperament; and by the fact that the pioneer initia
tive, the bold disregard for precedent, the perfect respect for the
identity of an unconsecrated medium, which the camera demanded
o its liberator and which he beautifully brought to it, lie in the
high national tradition. Finally: it is possible that the man's native
democracy, the conviction o the divinity immanent in every
individual, and the willingness patiently to await the moment of its
spontaneous selfconsciousness* and all that made him take the
American faith so very seriously as a boy, added another subcon
scious dynamic to the photographic Impulse. The medium was
supremely capable not only of demonstrating the eternal in the
fleeting expressions of the moment, ia every leaf of grass, and veri
fying the democratic intuition of the ubiquity of divinity. Its
apparent capacity for multiple products could render it, in the
hands of an artist, an immensely potent agent of truthful com
munication with vast numbers of people flung over a continent:
thud* an incomparable of symbiosis. And it is possible that
the young StieglitK la some way inferred this fact in the Berlin of
the 'eighties* Certainly, at times he cherished dreams of large,
widely distributed printings*
But to the actual evolution-
0f 1887. HAW* Alfred is in Lombardy and the
on one of hit regular spring and autumn excursions from
Berlin, n* Ii usual by bis large camera, living as is
usual t 11111% and taking photographs* He photographs in
in the country around Mamua, and in Venice, working
as i Twelve prints of hit new negative! arc sent by him
to the Ptotogwphtift competition. He receives
first and a purse The award was made by Dr.
il E an in England^ the future author
0C the Photography f and himsdf an
wiE ihortly win the praises o
J* McNeil Whiftler*
74 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
These prints, and prints of some of the other negatives Stieglitfc
has just made, are fortunately going to be preserved by the mem
bers of his family to whom he presents them, and will constitute
the earliest known specimens of his work extant in 1934. They are
perfect, originally realistic little genre pictures, taken in streets and
fields, and in the courtyards and passages of Venice, Their sym
bolic references are largely die beautifully felt shapes of a common
completely unromanticized and undecoratcd humanity that, an
ticipating most of the photographer's future human subjects, has
yielded Itself in open truthfulness to his camera's eye* The photo*
graphs themselves are excellent, straight, original exploitations of
the photographic medium; rich and subtle and correct in their dis
positions of light and dark; bare of "artfully" blurred effects or
other consequences of manual manipulation; firm and and in
some instances fluent in their They form, the
characteristically form; e?e it it a relatively
simple one, a thing more of of of
rhythmic order. In the and two
major one the
to it These the by but firm
position- Their points o con junction lie in the
center of the picture; in however, they lie very
in it* inducing the perceptive eye to risc f us it were, not only toward
which lies in the inner depths, but also in the
And with their constituent symbolic delicately tactile references* the
shapes of smiling children by the fountatnutde* of women
drawing witter from the of a
comfortably 0R the sunny of the of the
Lion, the forms reticently, tenderly, wa*
felt by the he
It is the 0f the the
one o the of the
iti tint of the mil, the
lfe and its *nct the
tod that the But It 10 ii
the of the nf in
tad the
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 75
arc love poems. And they have die directness and firmness that
flow from passioa and utterly unquestioning conviction in the artist.
Lenbach, who sees some of them in a photographic exhibition
held that winter in Munich, inquires of a common friend where
the photographer learned the laws of composition. Young Stieglitz
is amused by the reported inquiry: he knows nothing about these
laws. Analysis of the work of painters has never interested him
(nor will it ever do so). If he adores Rubens, it is entirely for the
master's puissant feeling through flesh of the beauty of life* As
for himself* he has merely striven to secure a balance among the
constituents of photographic forms that lie in what his eye sees,
and are placed in his power by the crude drawing of the camera.
For a few months that summer, he revisits America and then
returns to Berlin for three more years of intensive experimenta
tion; definitely decided that he is going to spend his life fighting
far the recognition of photography as an additional means of ex
pression; for the sake of something of importance which, he feels,
it has to give to the world. The prejudices of the artists against the
work of the camera do not disturb him* What if the photographic
exclude the direct introduction of the hutnaa orgaas?
lie will licit far an instant grant that products made by a largely
mentally controlled apparatus cannot have the quality of works of
art* literature require the introduction of the human organs, as
the plastic arts aftcl munic do? And li literature does not, why
photography be for the it li not "doae by
hand"? tif the manipulations o their sac-
sre **dead, w
He in the Black and in the Tyrol Again, it
is that the ustnple human being him, the feeling of
the o the clay* that he
lie his work to and exhibitions the
world over.
he w l would be a photographer
in t of than the pho
tographer In of
by the of one o his he goes
to
7 6 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
1895. NEW YOKK. It is now five years since Stieglite has lived in
America; five years since he has been in business, and two years
since he married Miss Emmeline Qbermeycr, the sister of one of his
friends.
During the first period of his repatriation, disgust at the rank-
ness of the civilisation in which he found himself assailed him
almost physically from the gilded and the naked squalor of the
city and its nasty streets. But, walking down Broadway one eve
ning shortly after his return, his eye fell on a theater-sign reading,
"Roman Actress Camilla" He had seen Bernhardt play the role;
he thoroughly disliked Dumas fife's claptrap; but he entered the
theater and took a front-row scat. There were perhaps fifty persons
in the audience. The curtain rose* the play commenced; at length
the leading lady, an unknown to himself* From the
moment of her entrance he sat in a spell At the close of the per
formance he bought front-row on the aide for every cine of
her subsequent appearances. And on the way that he
reiected that, could he but occasionally In New York nee something
with a quality of life and beauty comparable to that of the per
formance just given by the trnknowt* he very well be
able to endure his native land.
He had just discovered Eleonora Duse for himself*
A year before his return* his father had posted a tone!
Alfred of the option cm a photo-engraving and printing cmirerit
called the Heliochrome Engraving Gunpany. by the
apparent opportunity for craftsrnanlike work* to
gether with two of hii future brothers-in-law, the little*
plant and for the firsi time into with Un-
American workingman* The had IKTII
from Mr, John the of
under the that all the
be by the new and wni m for the
coapijiy. Times In the
0ft half pay or 01 the
no they kept
their of the of
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 77
the men actually put in or the absences caused by sickness. For a
year, their employees made samples, oiled the machinery, and sat
about reading newspapers, At last, when the small capital the three
young men had raised between them had practically been ex
hausted, the company procured a large order for color prints to be
done by the three-color process which it was among the first to
utilize. Joyfully, Stieglitz; showed the order to the workmen.
Scarcely a half hour after, the foreman entered the office and an
nounced that he had been delegated by the men to say that unless
they received an immediate ten-percent increase in their wages,
they would refuse to go to work*
Dumbfounded, Stieglitz demanded, "But aren't you willing to
give us a chance to get on our feet? You know we haven't drawn
a cent of salary ourselves, or any other money out of the busi
The foreman expressed regrets. He merely represented the
workers, he said*
Stieglite had to dampen his partners' immediate impulse to dis
charge the men, A new agreement was reached. It assured the
ten-percent increase on the basis of the hours actually put in.
The employees had indicated their disability to understand the
functioning and interests of the concern as a whole* Still, it was
not merely the interests of the concern itself they evidently could
not grasp* The new arrangement later proved actually less to their
own advantage than the former one, reducing their wages instead
of increasing them.
The entire incident, bom of an emphasis on the didh& o a
unionism whose principles were not truly understood, at the ex-
of emphasis on the execution of work and matten of crafos-
mimship equally vital to all involved, was symptomatic of a spirit
Sticglitas was to encounter all during his life, and by no means only
in the o worktngmen.
Fresh was raised* But during the last four years of its life
the has never thoroughly prospered* It has done good and
original ami of its methods, which will be taken to
Germany by friend Frit/, Goctz, will be put to profitable
uses there by the Brtickmann Verlag. But here in New York, con
dition* have not been favorable 10 like the workmen, the
78 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
business people have little intelligence, The inexperienced partners
began in perfect trustfulness, and, reports of their innocence having
spread through the business world, they have again and again
been victimized by concerns famous to the trade for their dis
honesty- Only the warning of one of its own competitors has saved
the Heliochromc Company from executing a large order for a
theatrical company which has swindled various other engraving
concerns. Indeed, up to the present hour, the partners have found
only two customers willing to pay promptly what they owe. One
of them is that eyesore to the virtuous, the Police (iussette* The rest
chronically, after their orders have been executed, strive to lower,
by innumerable artifices and extortions, the prices they have origi
nally agreed to pay,
Meanwhile, Edward Stiegliu, under the pressure of financial
cares, has* after a period of thirteen years*, in the woolen
trade, But during the course of a year, lie t quarter of
his fortune. Again lie retires from affairs. Ami, in the panic of
1907, about t half of the SUM left in fain will liftally
sMp from Ms
Now, in 1895, Alfred is ailing, A colic ha*
developed; he ha prostrated by pneumonia*, he in nervmutly
worn down* Like many other normally an<! confident in*
dividual** he is subject to periodic fits of discouragement; and lie
has been disillusioned alxwt the worker*, the hu*mc** world* and
their provision of opportunities for work of the quality awl in thr
spirit that will claw hi* IH* encrjjic* from him, Yielding to
universal advice that he drop affair* and go with hU wife to Kttrcifir
for a couple of yean, he too decide* to retire from
All this while he ha* not I If ha*
editing the he ha* fount! time to
photograph lie has
hi* and li at the
Cluh. hai ttiis that
Mi to am) tiie in
the of ttii he tia a few
thai like The lit
into 10 of anci In
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 79
the ranks of the American artists who have expressed the American
reality. The Terminal, Winter Fifth Avenue, Five Points, South
Street, and some of the others incidentally are uniquely beautiful
little representations of New York and the common metropolitan
scene; and as successful photographs of snowy streets they are
going to provide photography and art too with a new motive.
City snow scenes are going to make their appearance in numbers
after their exhibition, precisely as city night scenes are going to
follow in numbers the exhibition of Stleglitz's pioneer photographic
nocturne, the Icy Night, of 1896, What however concerns us here
is their indication of the fact of a decided development of the feel
ing and the art of their maker. The character of the feeling has
not changed since the European days; it is still as marvelously
gentle and firm, warm and penetrating as before; nor will it ever
in the years to come change its essential character. And the form is
the Sticglitzian one, though perhaps more rhythmic and dynamic
than It was. The feeling has merely broadened and deepened and
struck a more robust and tragic stratum of life than previously, and
the expression has, together with the old delicacy, a new power,
roundness, and intricacy- And the forms render not only the
superficial "feel 1 * of New York, the snap, the sharpness, the hard-
ami brightness* They convey the lives o the sturdy* responsible,
earth-fast common men whom Stieglitz to his joy has discovered at
their work in the pretentious city* The broad, humble, and earthy
rhythm and of The Terminal us the whole world of the
sturdy v little driver on the firm ground
with the elements and his horses; iti its paceulaei%
its healthy lowness. The dynamic form of the advancing
under the guidance of a weither-beatea driver between the reces
sive bluish of the sleety Avenue communicates the dogged
of the who rally battle thiogs* And all the prints
of the unouuciously convey smother world: that of the pho-
That too ii real He too is OB the earth> the
with life; touching it, receiving its buffets,
the lilt of ill its darkness tnd its
the other
and to their Mad
8o AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
1899. WHAT HISTORICALLY will be known as "American Pho
tography" has broadly beca making Its appearance in the world,
Amcricaa Photography is pictorial photography, by a group of
American camera artists: photography nonimitativc in spirit, the
live exploitation o an individual means; a reenforccment o the
artist's perennial demonstration that labor with tool* can be a joy
with the novel demonstration of the truth that labor with the
machine can be one, too; and a proof that the mechanical appa
ratus is at least quite a$ capable as is the hand or the implement
o producing objects with the quality of life and not considerable
upon valid grounds as secondary. Thus, American Photography is
an instrument and an incentive toward "the hutnaniftation of
society, the furtherance of the cause of justice! the creation of
a, democracy of the spirit/ 1 Such an instrument and such ait incen
tive art km always provided; since the esthetic, sympathetic
touch of: man upon hi* fellows, as well as feminine* sub
human and inanimate as well as human, which it and
the of life itself* and the intense for it in all its form*
and the feeling of Its wonder communicated by ir, provide a
for relationships and a commonwealth of responsibly elfreguUtory
individuals f and democracy. And to communicate the esthetic touch
and its findings through objects clearly dernonxtrativc of the
machine's perfect ability to transmit them is particularly to awaken
in the industrialist, the mechanic, the of the fxttcmiai fraternity
of his machines, and with dial feeling, to him an like
the artists of eld, of social relationship*.
For a century, the general of the machines in thr
of chap, quick maKs^prtxluction, has the ctf
life and and the human To this
"democratic" with Its df
its for quality in ban,
iii am*
a and III the It
to unite. It ti out
of thai the of the of
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 81
between man and the machine, so fraught with importance for
society, has come.
In 1896, the New York Society of Amateur Photographers was
considering the project of transforming itself into a bicycle club.
The flare of interest in photography had died away. As a nation,
we have always mounted some steed or other, whether horse,
bicycle, ocean liner, or theory, and used its motion as a means of
escaping from ourselves, and the expressions that bring us into
living relationship with one another,
Stieglitz, who had been devoting all his energies to photography,
had offered to help rebuild the club, to organize its exhibitions, and
to publish a photographic magazine, Camera Notes, that would be
issued gratis to club members. The members were won over by his
proposal ami offered him the presidency of the association* He pre
ferred the position of vice president: it gave him greater freedom
for action*
In the rooms of the club, and in Camera Notes, Steiglitz began
demonstrating the human friendliness of the machine. The demon
stration rapidly took form in exhibitions all over the world, and
continued to do no. Prints of others were shown far more fre
quently by himself than any of his own t for with characteristic
*{Kurt*manhip he was playing for the sake of the game>
working in the of the idea, giving the work of others
wherever the pat over his own, In the course of years he
has and will continue to receive from all over the world,
;i hundred and fifty of them; from London, Pari% Brussels, Turin,
Hamburg, Berlin, New York, Boston* Philadelphia* Munich,
Toronto,' and cither centers; and groups of his prints will find their
way into the at Dresden, Brussels, Berlin, Boston, and
Buffalo; into many private collections; and finally into the Metro
politan Mu*mm of Art in New York But in the American Pho-
it is Stdchcn who carries the banner. Stieglitz,
who in Icy Night* and The Platiron and The Hand of Man, has
the firit of his prtnti stands behind as
the
Ut It here be thtt the moralist in Sticgliw neither now
8 3 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGL1TZ
is, nor ever in the future will be, separate from the artist. Jn^ him,
as In every great artist, the moralist and the esthete are coordinate,
unified by the total impulse of the artist embracing them both, If,
therefore, in his various laboratories he shows pictures, his own
and others', in consciousness of an ethical end f and will continue
so to show them, he is not shaping his own or others* works to tut
end not their own, bat merely helping the whole spirit of the
artist to realize itself in the world
And let here also be stated that his forty-year-long prodigious*
General Nathanad Greene campaigns for democracy arc to
be conducted altogether on subsidies amounting to $37*000*
In the meanwhile; the leaders 01 American Photography have
formed an inner group which, adopting the o the modern
art movement in Munich, calls itself the Its Lon
don correspondent calls Itself the and who
Is one of the active of both it
the international The of the arc,
himself, Clarence HL White, and Joint
Prancli while Its it the
Frank T. Eciley, Eva
Wttson-SchtttEC, J* Alvin Gciburn, imd
Wm 6* Post. In 1903, from
lit?* the publication of the group'* quarterly organ,
Work* Itself another magnificent tletnomtraibn of the potentialities
of the machine and of what the feeling of life can crraic
it and its products in the way of printed publication*.
W^ is perhaps the of alt
periodicals, outdistancing it* rival, the fit
of Bruno U is itself a of an: the hav-
ing been on o Ua aitd
printing, the quality of the the of the the
format 'of the arc and
of the art
the and alt arc
in lie of the mil
They ire In lor
the to tint of the
in to gtt the com-
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 83
mittce takes thirty of the gravures o Camera Wor\ t mounts and
frames and hangs them to represent America in the exhibition.
And according to the criticisms, the litde American section makes
the show a success; and it is not until it is over that the fact that
the American section has consisted entirely of the plates of Camera
WorJ^ becomes generally known. Later, in making an address
before the Royal Photographic Society on the development of pho
tography* the president illustrates his talk with photogravures
from the American quarterly,
It is a constantly progressive, steadily cumulative work of art. In
the course of its fifty splendid numbers, Camera Worf^ will come
to give the complete record not only of the evolution of pictorial
photography, but of modern art in America up to the time of
America's entrance into the World War. It presents, to begin with,
numerous significantly arranged specimens of the experiments in the
new photography, the coloristic as well as the monochromatic, rep
resenting the work o the most important American photographers
as late as Paul Huviland and Paul Strand, and that of their Euro
pean collaborators Demachy, De Meyer, the Hofmcisters, Hinton,
Annan, Evans* Hcnnebcrg, Kiihn, Waizck, Puyo; and plates by
Hill and Mrs* tlamcron, (The unfortunate, unavoidable omissions
lire few: principally Emerson and die them entirely unknown
Atget.) Besides, it carries important critical articles cm photography
and art specially written for it by Bernard Shaw, Maeterlinck,
Charles Caffin, It Child Bayky, Annan, Sadakichi Hartmann,
John B* Juhlp Roland Rood, Virginia Sharp, Stieg-
lit*, Marius de Mabel Benjamin de Cassercs,
Demaehy, Keiley, Biuemner, Francis and Gabrielie Picabia,
and From the of 1906 onward, shortly after
and his open the little experimental
gallery in the attic of No. 991 Fifth Avenue, its
the public reception of the exhibits by re-
the of the New York critics, Caffia,
clown 10 the very divinatory ch^ d'mwre
oE and Gary. After 1908, when Stieg*
Iit9s the of art to photography
and M idea by the new coloristic
oC the at ap, its togetha
84 AMERICA AND ALFRED ST1EGLITZ
with a citation of Plato's early salutation o cubism in the Phil*btt$ 9
magnificent colored and black-and-white reproductions o the
work of the painters and sculptors the gallery exhibits; sometimes
for the first time in New York, sometimes for the first time in
the world. They contain superb colored reproductions of the washes,
till then ridiculously neglected, of Rodin; of water colors of John
Marin; and paintings by Steichcn; and black-and-white reproduc
tions of C&anne, whose water colors Stieglitz was the first to show
in America; and reproductions of those other introductions of hts
the paintings, drawings, and sculpture of Picasso and Matisse, the
paintings of Picabta, the drawings of Manolo and WalkowitK* the
"charaeatures 11 of DC Zayas; and photographs recording the dis
position of the exhibits in the Brancusi shows* And in Camera
Worlds letterpress, there appears some of the first work of Ger
trude Stein, Mina Loy Max Wefaer, John Marin, Leonard
van Noppen to be published*
The annual subscription rate is five doUari six* Like the
attic-gallery and the deeply critical of ii/
Ctmera Wri( a climate in which liCc and art can thrive ut
a high level In 1917 it publication, with a subscription
list; of thirty-aix*
$
PEBIWAEY, 1921* Up in the dayiit of the Gal
leries in New York City! the shabby walls arc supporting *h**w c*f
a hundred and forty-odd major works of art the life
work of the boy la the dark tt life work ni yet
Let us examine little f
and burning lights effectively in their if while,
They arc optical and tactile dr iti
three of the values to
considered thttfc of the of They
first of all, to the dc the In
with matchless Though are
lying within cif
and silver, anI ilii*
and of mil
a mid
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 85
shadow to brightest light, and including a fabulous variety of inter
mediary qualities of lustrousness, precisely corresponds to Nature's.
It renders the differences of distance correctly, and in some measure
distinguishes the variety of color. The photographic textures are as
continuous and unbroken as those of the visible scene; and as
subtly, if not more subtly so than those of any other pictorialist.
The drawing is sensitive and fluent, in many instances prodigiously
delicate and swift, vigorous and powerful Besides, these photo
graphs* conformity with appearances is invariably extraordinarily
bold and inclusive; for it is a conformity with appearances hitherto
unrecorded. The prints bring wonderfully clearly before the eye
virgin clay and night-time aspects of the city, of the countryside
and humanity. They represent skyscrapers, windowpanes filigreed
with frost and dust, glistening wheel rims, car horses, smudged
snow, brick walls, cement walls, wooden barn walls, steel girders,
smoke, cloudlands, steel rails and wires. They portray the folk of
the American streets in moments of intense expressiveness; work
men, business people, professional people, artists, the women of the
kitchens, the little West Side apartments, the shining limousines.
They bring the eye close to the human epidermis, to the pores, the
fine halrn on the shin bone> the veins of the wrist, the moisture on
the lips. They draw motives beautifully from every portion of the
person of the woman, from naked feet and feet stockinged and
shod, to cars and nostrils, breasts, bdUies, hips, buttocks, navels, arm*
pits, and the bones underneath the skin of throat and chest
But these accurate and novel representations are also complete
abstract* individually dynamic, forms. Each is a total three-
dimensional form made up of formal units, The rectangular sur
face of every one of the prints is divided Into two or more
rhythmically disposed, intrinsically interesting primary units, which
In turn are made up of aggregations of smaller units, some of them
fine hair lines, of them gamuts and rhythms of light. These
primary units pairs or groups of antitheses, intricately,
subtly complementary In point of tone and of shape and balance;
far tbey are predominantly triangular and oval, beak-shaped and
belkhaped* And pairs of antitheses define dynamic pyramidal
and concave volumes: a prodigy potential m the medium of
chiaroscuro for the that, when juxtaposed, different quail-
86 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
tics of light recede, and fall from, and advance toward, and
ascend from the eye at various degrees of speed* The volumes
equilibrate each other In weight and direction of movement: and
what the student of the photographs actually had before him Is one
hundred and forty-odd simulacra of spaces coextensive with dy
namically counter-pressing, interpenetrating, and mutually equi
librating volumes or forces in motion. The character o this
counterpressure and interpenetratioa varies from picture to picture,
quite like the character and disposition of the formal units* In
variably firm, in instances it is gentle*, in others strenuous, in still
others violent, suggesting struggle and conflict But in all the pic
tures, the aspiring tendency of movement predominates, despite the
earthward declension of the blacks: possibly for the reason that
vortical pyramids to dominate the other possibly for
the reason that small of burning white by virtue
o their intensity balance of
they are by their complements, the whites still appear
to tend and shoot inEnitely upward The to
float aloft*
And again: accurate representations and
the eye as patterns* unities* complete and living arc*
immensely symbolical The transmit
ences of life: deep large draughts of American nature, American
life in particular: the reaching and overreaching of
this country today; in all the tensity of the and
conflicts following the multiple 01 the
nately individual woman; In all its and and
the of the the and! in
til the novel of
The arc The arc
into the and of the
and that
the 01 the the
ideas that* like 11 scut* to Ic lie
In they
in the of of and tine
and they the of
to tit
THE BOY IN THE DARK ROOM 87
order concurrent with those yearnings, insurgences, ecstatic leaps;
and the eternity and infinity that seem to lie magnetically at the
apex of their roads of progress. They also symbolize relationships
the most subtle and intricate; relationships of nervous refined mod
erns giving life to each other, fortifying each other by their free
counter pressure and interpenetratkm; relationships of whole
groups and communities of nervous refined moderns making life
possible by their free mutual oppositions and complementariness;
whole democracies; "anarchist communes," They actually are sym
bols of the Most High.
The photograph's individually dynamic "abstract" form is actually
a spontaneous, umnduced photographic representation of material
harmonies and cosmic ordinations, produced in profound sympathy
with these relationships. And their superfine "conformity with
nature** is a conformity cither with the objective forms whose rela
tionships actually excited the photographer's imagination, or with
an equivalent o some vision excited by a previous experience and
carried about la his head against the discovery of objective circum
stances propitious to their expression.
The Sublime! Before these hundred and forty-odd somberly,
deeply glowing representatives of a life work still far from cul
mination we are facing om at the grandest consequences of the
emergence o spirit from the American soil We face symbols of a
Life, a Law our very own affirmed by the beauty and worth with
which the photographer has suffused them* Before these revelatory
forms. In beauty, inclusivity, and significance to none of
of the period^ and to very few o past ones, we know,
as for a First time, our very Self In its depth and height and pos
sibility; know it In the myriad surrounding human forma once
now plainly kindred to us* and in the soil we tread.
A slender, mcdium^ited In a business suit, with a shock of
irofrfray hair and Intensely bright eyes glowing through iron-
in a corner of the gallery, talking
httmorowly, debonairly to the people, battling for the
in many heads, his own and others,
in their form the basis of relationships* He
ii the of the pints.
We know; at time this man recognized not only that he
88 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGUTZ
was seeing symbols of the order and law o things, but knew that their
beauty and worth, and all the floating "higher, purer, more un
known" Thing perpetually attracting him and moving him to give
himself "freely, gratefully" to itself, were inextricably connected
with his own person's unity of function and active health and love;
and that that spirituality and its fruits in life and art and leader
ship themselves were born of and were portions of the vast harmony
of an infinite substance sometimes called God.
That evidently was the light in the dark room.
ROSEN FEUX
IV. PHOTOGRAPHY BEFORE STIEGLITZ
A NOTABILITY IN THE CAMERA WORLD once said, "Photography
would be a fine thing i it were not for the pictures." At
that date* three quarters of a century ago, it might well be true.
The known processes offered little temptation as a means to artistic
expression. Essentials to success were a leaning towards chemistry
and physics, a liking for the manipulations they entailed, and for
work away from a studio good muscular development. Enlarging
was not practical* even if negatives could have been made which
would stand it; so that a large camera was needed. The process
which was then mostly used made it necessary for the glass to be
coated, sensitized* and developed where the photograph was made;
for the exposure had to be given while the freshly prepared plate
waa still wet, to that some tort of dark room must accompany
the camera, A photographer 1 ! outfit often weighed fifty or even a
hundred times what we now use. Moreover* making a negative
called for manual dexterity and skill, only acquired with much
practice and many failures*
When* in o all obstacles, the photographs were made,
they had apparently inherent* of just the kind to deter an
had to be so long that in portrait and figure work
and consciousness were rampant. To the same
be attributed the blurs which represented leaves in
In there was a queer falsity in the perspec
tive which was to the lens, although actually due only to
iti A very imperfection was the way in which the
tone of the original in the photograph to be
falsified, not only in the reproduction of colored subjects, but even
90 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGL1TZ
whei^c color did not obtrude. Little was then known on the subject
of gradation; in fact, it was not until some time after the dry pkte
had displaced the wet plate that we learned how incorrect had been
our notions and how limited our control over tone relationship.
Photography, when first known* was expected to follow respect
fully upon the lines followed by painters, and that epoch was the
very heyday of the painting which told a story or taught a lesson.
So, almost without exception, photographers tried to make their
prints dramatic or even didactic, which, as we now see plainly
enough, is precisely what photography is least fitted to do. If sub*
jects of this kind are worth doing, at any rate they are not worth
attempting with a camera; but they were attempted; and for a kmg
period of years these photographs which when they were exhibited
received the most applause appear to us now as melancholy ex
amples of misapplied skill and labor. There was this
for the pioneers^ that* while they were only of the
kind which was to the front la the other If they
had had other the tad it their
disposal were not enough to than to them,
Bernard Shaw later on (ipi) summarized the when he
wrote:
. .^ . the process was not quite ready For the ordinary artist, because
(i) it could not touch colour or even give colour* their proper light
values; (a) the impressionist movement had not rediscovered and
popularised the great of ait that lies (3) the eyes
of had been so bug educated to the
conventions as truths of representation that many of the of the
fociissing-icrceii were at first as (4) ttie
wide lens did tit lie as as I
Academician whilst the was and the
silver print, so thai the best will, if they but, be <tac
clay by was tad only to *
o (5) all, the py
50 for A of a they
i a price for a tad tw0
ittt bid for *n At saM
urn* had bom nt
the 50 in til that is
PHOTOGRAPHY BEFORE STIEGLITZ 91
What follows is an outline of the period from the first photog
raphy to the end of the nineteenth century, by which time both the
processes and those who used them had progressed, so that in the
eyes of many best qualified to judge, photography had become a
medium capable of use by the artist, and was so being used more
and more each year. The change was necessarily gradual, depend
ing upon many factors, but for at least the last fifteen years of the
century it was plain enough. It is at that period that we first en
counter the name of Alfred Stieglitz, so this sketch may be taken
as a background against which other writers will set thdbr record
of what he did and what he has been in photography during the
List thirty years or more. While not dealing in detail with the
technical side of photography, we must have some outline of its
development if the progress of its use as art is to be traced, since the
one acted directly upon the other.
PHQTOCKAPH* XN TOE SENSE in which the word is generally under
stood today were first made almost exactly a hundred years ago; for
although 1839 is accepted as the date of the birth of photography,
since in that year both Dagucrre and Fox Talbot published their
methods, both of those experimenters must have obtained some kind
o photogriphs before they felt their process to be ripe for publi
cation. Talbot we know did IQ for a view of his home at Lacock
Abbey 1835, In fact, it was under some form of gentle
that In January, 1839, a fortnight later than Daguorre* he
announced what he had already donet
The photographs which Dagucrre exhibited were delineation
of outdoor in the neighborhood of Paris made on MgMy
of silvered copper* At first, the eiposures required
too to human portraiture possible; but later the
o the plates was increased, and for about a
portraits were made in large numbers,
tre Mitt ift and form the only photographic record
we of they portray. The process kdd out little hope of
any to art The wore on metal and had to be
held at one to the light to be seen at all, the high
92 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
lights being then formed by a kind of graying over o the polished
surface, and the shadows being a reflection of some dark mass by
that surface. At another angle the image appeared as a negative,
with its light and shade reversed. There was no satisfactory way of
duplicating daguerreotypes, each one being the result of a separate
exposure. Their outstanding quality was their fine detail; and this
enabled them to hold their own for portraits, until the wet plate
gave us paper prints which might show as much detail as the
daguerreotype itself. Daguerreotypes theipbeased to be made, and
were not followed by anything which could be said to derive from
them, photography today having developed from the process in
vented by Fox Talbot
Taibot's process gave negative images on paper; Images* that is to
say* in which the shadows were the more transparent parts and the
lights the more opaque; but by what may be regarded as a repeti
tion of the process* paper negatives would yield positive
prints* prints in which the lights and were no longer re
versed* The process required much longer than that of
Daguerre! and owing to the negatives on and not on
prims from them had a granular which could noc
be entirely prevented by waxing the paper of the negative* In
days, and for long afterwards, dean-cut definition was demanded
so insistently that any process which did not yield it was thought
little of; so that although "Talbotype," or "Caloiype," as its mow
sensitive modification was named, was used with great pictorial
effect by one worker, Hill, his pictures were disregarded and
allowed to drop quite out of sight fur nearly half a century*
For about a years there was no oilier
two methods. Then, in 1851, Archer the wet
collodion which cm which
could be made oil paper; and at in tic
thirty yean other of which into
use to a limited they had no or
quality. From its in 1%! was
until it wai finally the by
first with at the and
then with film. ire the we u*c Thr
has it fin* lie*
PHOTOGRAPHY BEFORE STIEGLITZ 93
came available, in its sensitiveness, in the way in which it renders
tone values, and in its power of dealing with colored subjects; but
in all its essentials it is today the process which between 1878 and
1888 supplanted wet collodion, except for certain special purposes.
From the time when the first negatives on glass were made,
processes for giving paper prints from these negatives became of
importance. At first plain paper was used, sized, it is true, but
not so aslto impart any glaze to the surface. The sensitive material
was silver chloride, salts of gold subsequently giving a purple color
to the image. Then this "silver paper" was coated with either one
or two layers of albumen, which gave a gloss enabling it to repro
duce all the fine detail in the glass negative. Most of the old faded
portraits in family albums were printed on this albumenized paper,
which was also very largely used for exhibition work. That the
fading was avoidable is plain, since many of these exhibition prints
still exist without any great signs of change, demonstrating that
with the care more likely to be used with a print for exhibition,
the results gave fair promise of permanence.
Photographers wanted something more than fair promise, though;
and in 1864 this was found in the carbon process of Swan* Carbon
prints can have an image o any desired color whatsoever; almost
any pigment which can be used by the painter can be made the
basis of a carbon print* This enabled the worker to get away from
the "photographic purple 1 * and red-brown silver prints. Moreover,
there was a wide choice in the papers which were its basis, and the
surface could be gloy or mat at will. A few years later the
platinum was introduced; and platinum and carbon prints
figured very largely in the exhibitions, although never displacing
the earlier methods entirely. Bromide paper followed, giving a pure
black image, union toned and not involving a glossy surface, this
paper being sensitive enough to allow enlargements to be made
upon it. Modern photograph* are more frequently made on bromide
paper, or on modifications known as chloro-bromide; but other
tueh * "gumAichromate," ^oil-printing/ 1 and "bromoil,"
may be mentioned*
Such in outline arc the principal processes which have been at
the of the photographer. Their later progress has been on
two lines, one giving powers by increased sensitiveness and
94 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGL1TZ
more faithful tone rendering, the other by simplifying the manipu
lations to such an extent that they no longer demand almost the
monopoly of a photographer's attention. He can concentrate upon
those quite different problems which are concerned with picture-
making itself*
Limiting what follows to British workers almost exclusively has
not been voluntary on my part; but attempts to discover parallel
instances in Europe or America, at any rate until about 1890, have
ended in failure. Great attention was given to the technique of
photography wherever it was practised, as is shown by the con
tents of the photographic journals; nor were the commercial aspects
of studio portraiture overlooked Landscape subjects seem always
to have been almost a British preserve; hut although exhibitions
were held from time to time, most oC the recorded criticisms indi
cate that professional portraiture was their backbone. Certainly I
have failed to find traces in other its of as Hill
and Mrs, Cameron Solomon in France* This
may be due to the fact that we have had in London regukr
exhibitions by what is now the loyal
Society, back for sixty or without a when
in other countries exhibitions have only irregularly arttl
at longer intervals* My failure is to confirmed by a
book by Bossert and Guttmann y "Lw Premier* Ttmft fa Itt PhQto*
grephiet iB^tBj, published In Paris in 1930 by KUmmarum. The
authors seem to have been at great pains to collect curly phout-
graphs from ill over the world; but out of two hundred which
they reproduce almost all arc either portraits of the
sional kind, mostly complete with painted studio or
else rely upon the intrinsic of the
Almost the only to this are the pie*
tures by are to be If 1
pictorial I cm
Dr. 01
The firm we and that tt the of
ii that of JDavidl Hilt Hill w*s a
wn by the cl the of
in 1841 to a tit He pro*
10 til alt AIM! it this
PHOTOGRAPHY BEFORE STIEGLITZ 95
meant several hundred portraits, he called in the aid o Calotype.
Wisely Hill decided not to embarrass himself more than need be
with the manipulations, so he engaged Robert Adamson, a skillful
chemist* as his collaborator. In his studio on the Calton Hill, Edin
burgh, he photographed many of the ministers, and in addition a
number of the celebrities who then made Edinburgh their home
or who came to that city. Some of his pictures, faithfully repro
duced in photogravure by Craig Annan, a name of note in the
world of pictorial photography, appeared at different times in
Camera Worf^ the magnum opus of Stieglitz.
Many are surprised when they learn that some of the finest and
strongest portraiture ever done by photography goes back to 1843-
1846, years before negatives on glass were practicable at all It may
not have occurred to them that success in photography is not a mat
ter ol modern appliances and inventions these only extend the
sphere within which successes may be made but is concerned
with the artist using the camera. Besides, while Hill had many
handicaps, he was not without some counterbalancing aids. In his
day there were at least no photographic conventions to trammel
him, He had not to please a public which had its own notion of
what a photograph should look like. To the vast majority of those
who then saw his portraits, they must have been the first photo-
on paper they had ever seen. The long exposures (three
minutes it said to have usual) > the imperfections of the only
then to be had, with the granularity of the paper
on which his hid to be combined to free Mm from
any fear of that and detail which is one of
the of the photographer. Again, work in any
sunshine was most difficult, tad tMs also
to give the and vigor which ctetcterize til Ms
But may be merely as sorae offset to 1 Mi diffi-
and the merit of the work which we have by this old
o! ii HUTi abac. Craig Annan writes:
Ha bad an for 'his ia a grtod and im-
Hit b petto* his of light tad
or* and aad M$ pictures that power
aad ao to or explain, but which ia always
9 6 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
apparent in the work of a master, and distinguishes it from that of an
earnest conscientious practitioner of less capacity*
J. T. Keiley, writing in Camera Worf^ of the Buffalo Exhibition
of 1911, described the Hill Collection shown there as:
. . , splendid, vital, virile, and by comparison, some of the finest of
the modern portraiture shown in this collection seems thin, anaemic
and over-conscious.
Hill's photography ceased in 1846, and the remaining twenty-four
years o his life were occupied with painting. For the best part of
half a century after he ceased to photograph* his work was lost
sight of* No one could read of it; for all that photographers knew,
he might never have existed. A volume of his print* was in the
possession of the Royal Photographic Society; but it was not until
Mr. Craig Annan drew attention to him at a time when the
academic influence upon photography was away, that it
began to be realized that in the Scottish painter the use of the
camera had found a great pioneer* Then David Octavius Hill
began to take his proper in its history. By for
tune not only many of Ms prints, but hi$ negative* all upon
of course, waxed to give it greater translucency* had pre
served; some of them have been printed by modern method* and
0ow have a permanence which will enable future workers to ice
them as they should be $ee* Most of Hill 1 ! picture* were por*
traits, single figures or groups of two or three, although there
were a few exception*, landscape apparently he elk! not attempt.
The next outstanding photographer In of elate was
Julia Margaret Cameron* who also to portraiture.
At her home at Freshwater, In the Ilk of Wight, the enjoyed the
friendship of many at the notable men and women cil the day.
Ctrtylct Darwin* Sir Tennyscut Ellen
Terry, and O. F. Watts trc only a lew of the thi*
to lit to hers and
for the wed ike wa
far than the 10 Kilt was
we o of wo* or five
Sto was the in the the la the
for in a i
PHOTOGRAPHY BEFORE STIEGLITZ 97
had been made against it ten years before, at the very first meet
ing of the Royal Photographic Society, by its vice president, the
painter Sir W. J Newton.
Mrs* Cameron did not so much verbally preach as visibly prac
tise* She used large-size plates many measured 12 x 15 inches; she
worked with very imperfectly corrected lenses, although later on
special lenses for soft definition were made for her; the long
exposures almost inevitably entailed movement on the part of her
sitters, which in itself destroyed fine definition; it is reported also
that she did not hesitate to put sheets of glass between the negative
and the paper when printing. All contributed towards securing soft
results* Her work was first publicly shown at the exhibition of
1864, where it was highly praised by some of the lay press, notably
the Athen<Kum Its critic remarked that her pictures, "although
sadly unconventional in the eyes of the photographers, give us
hope that something higher than mechanical success is attainable
by the camera*** Not so the photographic journals. These grant that
her portraits **have a very distinctive character of their own," as
Indeed they have* but "as one of the especial charms of photography
consists in its completeness, detail, and finish, we can scarcely com
mend works in which the aim appears to have been to avoid these
qualities 19 ; while another refers to Mrs. Cameron as 4< one of the very
few ladies whose works adorn (?) the walls of the room*" Owing
to its reception by photographers, Mrs. Cameron subsequently held
a separate exhibition, where the pictures received appreciation from
of the critics; but among photographers she proved to be
altogether her time- At her death ia 1879 ifc WM grudgingly
admitted that she had a beaeicial influence upon the dis
ciples of the camera which few now will deny* Some of her
still and a few were reproduced in Camera Wor^
in 1913.
If we to ee who were enjoying a general acceptance when
Mrs* was over* we find two names outstanding
in the for thirty years, Rejlander and Robinson,
of with a host of followers, trod in the footsteps of the
of the day to th* fullest extent photography would
albw. They allegory, t% for iastancc, Rejlander
ia The Two Ways of Lie and drama, eg*, Robinson's Fading
98 AMERICA AND ALFRED SHEGLITZ
Away. The mere technical difficulties were Immense; but, great as
they were, they were exceeded by the artistic difficulty that the
camera's supreme merit is precisely that it cannot do the one thing
or the other. It depicts far too faithfully. Nevertheless, these workers
had a great vogue.
Rejlander, a Swede, spent some of his early years at Rome and in
Spain^ studying painting, and came to England as a portrait painter*
Much of his photography was done in the dingy Black Country,
at Wolverhampton, but in 1860 he moved to London, where he
lived until his death in 1875* Beginning with prints made from a
single negative, many of which enjoyed a popularity fur beyond
photographic circles, he took up combination printing* His best
known picture of this sort was The Two Ways of Lifc already
mentioned^ exhibited in 1857. It combines in one print parts of
more than twenty different negative*; and ia a of
tableaux symbolizes the o two youths follow
the same diverse m were followed by
As a d^ it it but even at the time
when it It was viewed by as out a liittita*
tioa of photography which is plain to ua today,
himself realized thi% and combination printing
A few, but very few, o his photographs remain* though a
great many persist in the form o woodcut* in popular magazine*.
He was intensely cnthmiastic in his photography and made a
of fricndi, but his worldly position suffered from hi* tmthuiiwtt*
Mention has been o Adam Salomon, be
written of him may be interpolated He waa a In
France who turned to photography ia 1861; but hi* waa
first brought into prominence at ihc Paris
in 1867, when the of The m
ing an oC it that *1
hundreds* 1 to ste it* we are not to
that it had <f a the of
A ttii
aa
* * * I nut of
andt m tin mA tif fat
PHOTOGRAPHY BEFORE STIEGLITZ 99
managed, the result is extreme brilliancy. On a closer examination we
find that there is as much delicacy as brilliancy, the utmost gradation of
half-tone prevailing throughout the whole picture.
Probably some of Salomon's portraits still exist in old albums in
French provincial homes, but we have no means now of judging
work which undoubtedly impressed his contemporaries. We are
told that he did not hesitate to use brushwork on both negatives
and prints, and that while his pictures were not as sharp as the
lens could make them, there is nothing he was so intolerant of as
anything out of focus. Salomon lived just long enough to use
gelatino-bromide plates, dying in 1881. As far as one can learn, he
limited himself to portraiture.
To resume, in exhibition history between 1858 and 1890 the name
which looms largest of all is that of Henry Peach Robinson, His
first important picture, exhibited in 1858, was Fading Away, de
picting the deathbed of a girl, with three other figures introduced.
This print was obtained by combination printing from several nega
tives. A long of pictures followed, $ome of them having a
similar origin, but most being simple straightforward prints from
a single negative* Robinson had the reputation of a "combiner,"
and many of his pictures which were alleged to be combination
prints actually were not For many years he led die way, imitated
by a host o disciples who did not find him at all easy to follow* His
name will alwtyi be coupled with work of a particular style, but
actually ho was ?cry fiur from hidebound; and the photographer
pictures were on wet plates at a time when, as he
told me he not only had to coat his plates, but actually to
the coUodbn with which he did so, at die end of his career
was e&thuiiftfticsdiy using a hand camera and ocfaibitiBg work
done with it He died in 1901*
I
Van a quarter of a century at least, photog
raphy ts in the its way, following at a
the by the painters whose names
In expounded and praised
ioo AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITX
by academic critics. Towards the end of the 'eighties the move
ments which had stirred the art world began to affect that of the
camera. Amateurs no longer concentrated their attention upon
technical problems; improvements in material made this much less
of a necessity* Attempts at picture-making by photography became
more plentiful, and societies and clubs were formed at which,
although processes and appliances were not ignored, the results of
using those processes and appliances took a more prominent place.
Both in New York and in London,, Camera Clubs were started*
and the old-established professional and scientific journals found
themselves confronted by publications which concentrated on sub
jects which previously had received only casual attention.
Throughout the period then coming to an end, writing on art
for photographers had been almost exclusively limited to the sub
ject of composition. Burners Art B$my$# published half a century
before, had been long out of print; but later,
avowedly to meet the o photographer^ in which the
material had been used, and rules formulated on
from the works of great painters, illustrated with demon
strating pyramidal construction, balance* and kindred matters, had
enjoyed a large sale. Among their authors Robinson attained ait
easy preeminence, By his book$ and countless magazine articles, lie
took and kept the first place for over twenty years. He wrote inter
estingly and fluently, and had also, of course* a advantage in
being known not merely, or even primarily* as a writer but as a
worker, teaching as much by example as by precept, although hi
teaching was accepted after his picture-inaking had a little
las outstanding. People began to realize that print*
ing, even in hand* an skillful as hit own, wan not In the
result Not only were Iti wrong* they out o by
photographic
It was at this that the re*
very The dry did
away at i with of the and
of Its at the
of the
tmn hid and 10
and the of ill
PHOTOGRAPHY BEFORE STIEGLITZ 101
It was followed by the introduction of orthochromatic emulsions,
the first step towards correct color reproduction in monochrome;
although it took another thirty years or more for this to reach
perfect accuracy in the panchromatic plates and films as we have
them today. The early 'eighties saw also the perfection of Willis's
"hot-bath" platinotype, followed a few years later by the "cold-
bath" process, a further simplification* These methods gave prints
of a quality which surpassed altogether everything that had pre
ceded them. Now that the cost of platinum has almost made the
process obsolete, the platinum print is still the criterion by which
other printing methods are judged; and modern chloro-bromide
papers can have no higher praise than that they yield results "equal
to platinum.** We may note in passing that the process was worked
out with no such object Its inventor was not a photographer at
all, but an engineer^ who was led by some experiments to devise
a paper which would give an image consisting simply of metallic
platinum on plain paper, thus yielding a print which it might be
assumed was as permanent as a print could be. That these prints
should be ideal for pictorial work just happened.
Such was the state of things in the middle 'eighties: not so very
different from whit it had been twenty years before, but ripe for
change. In Great Britain the pioneer in the revolution then begin
ning was Dr. P, H. Emerson, whose landscapes had begun to
attract acteiitbiiaml denunciation. He seems to have been quite
prepared for both; his powers as a picture maker being at least
equaled by his vigor as a controversialist* When I say that one
to the from his pea contains among its expres
sions ignorance unbelievable 1 * ^wilfully tad stupidly malicious**
~ M amther lie 11 "doubly dishonest as a critic and a man**
**! brand him ai a coward and a liar/ 1 the letter itself being
written 10 "contradict a few of the lies 11 ; it will be admitted that as
a denunciator I>r* had little to fear- The cause of all
this, tad t deal more, was the publication of his book,
which first appeared in 1889 and was
at by a edition.
In nay of pict0rial photography this is an outstanding
It the of as we know it today;
of that which ii ia the pages of Camera
102 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
Wor\. It is true Hill and Mrs. Cameron had lived and died: but
when Naturalistic Photography was published, photographers knew
just as much of Hill's portraits as they did of the contents of the
tomb of Tutankhamen; and Mrs. Cameron's, if not quite lost to
sight, had at least never had photographic appreciation, In a paper
read in 1886 before the Camera Club of London, Emerson had
sketched out his position; three years later he gave the finished
picture.
He describes his aim in Naturalistic Photography as to "give
enough science to lead to a comprehension of the principles which
we adduce for our arguments for naturalistic photography, and we
shall give such little instruction in art as is possible by written
matter, for art we hold is to be learned by practice alone- 1 * The
need for it is described by saying that "nearly all the text-book*
teach how to cultivate the scientific side of photography, and they
are so diffuse that we find photomicrography, analysis
and art all mixed up together, 11
The author 1 * object was accomplished in three The firnt
contained the "terminology and argument* 1 with an account of
naturalism in pictorial and glyptic art, and a chapter on the phe
nomena of sight and art principles deduced therefrom. The
section on technique and practice in sufficiently described by those
words. The third, entitled "Pictorial Art, 11 included in its scope the
education of the ey<? composition- which criticize* Burners Tmai/ff
on I*aintinjp~-$ugge*tiunx on picture-making !>oth in the studio
and out-of-dwrs, and general "hint* on art. 1 * In M I/Knvoi" Kmernon
puts the case for photography a* cine of the pictorial
for It "a technique more perfect than any of the art* yet treated lift 1 *
"standing at the top of the tone of rncthtxlx nf M>
nearly perfect in lu technique that In If may fc com
pared with the colour lie claims that while it* of
Ii limited ii is less no than thai of any cuiicr urni white
method. Its drawing 1$ all but absolutely rtwf w if the
arc properly used. 11 "It renders the if
arc antl Ii
is tlita in outline; but in
free any oC aft of the
hid it. of the firnt or sure
PHOTOGRAPHY BEFORE STIEGLITZ 103
still to be picked up second hand. To complete its history: the
second edition was withdrawn, and some years later a third edition
was published in America and in England in 1899, much inferior
in typography, and largely altered. The cause o the changed con
tents was that Dr, Emerson had become acquainted with the
scientific work of Hurter & Driffield; and, from what I believe to
be an entirely mistaken view o its bearing on the subject, had
come to the conclusion that photography could not be an art. This,
however, is not very material. The book had done its work; and
the author's published "Retractation*' was about as effective as a
captain's "retractation" of a discharged torpedo. The book had been
compared to a "bomb/* so such a simile may pass.
The reception given to Naturalistic Photography was a mixed
one, In quarters which it made no attempt to assail it was favorably
if mildly reviewed; in the strongholds of amateur photography,
whore all that it denounced was rampant, it was received with
vituperation inferior to its author's only because its opponents
carried fewer literary guns. The discussion which at first raged
around N&uratttfic Photography and its champion passed gradu
ally to the subject of definition in photographs, on which even now
It bubbles up from time to time. The old type photographer, actively
encouraged by the ICES maker, regarded the most pin-sharp defini
tion and the clearest possible details as essential As all his life he
had been confronted with the difficulty of getting such photographs,
it wan only natural that he should consider any that had not these
qualities ti defective* made those who produced them could
clo no It wai that the phrase "the cult of the spoiled
print 11 was coined* Many of critics never did realize that
of the workers who such means for the suppression of
unwanted detail perfect technicians*
The last 0f the nineteenth century may therefore properly
be u marking the birth of photopaphy as a means of
We have how the technicians and the many-
hod the way; and this having been done, there
wai an immense accession to the ranks of photog
rapher*, a few who saw in it a power
they had not and endeavored to use it* They
alio to and to claim a place among
104 AMERICA ANE> AUPKJEX* STIEGLITZ
those who had hitherto been supreme. It was a time of struggle.
In England, the technicians were strongly entrenched in the old-
established Society; its hanging committees and boards o judges
had hitherto been their preserve, and they were not prepared at
first to admit any o the newcomers i they could help it. They
could not help it, however, and pictorial photography in the modem
sense was accepted.
We have now corne down to the time which bounds my subject.
Stieglitz was known in England as an occasional exhibitor. At the
Royal, in 1894, we find him showing a Hew York subject, Winter,
which was favorably criticized but none too well hung. There was
an impression that he was inspiring work in America which went
far beyond anything which had been done in Europe; but it was
not until the Royal Photographic Society in October, 1900, opened
its house to "An Exhibition of Prints by the New School of Amer
ican Photography" that this was much more than an impression.
Although the collection then shown was far from complete, it was
known that the very possibility o such a show was largely his*
and that in tJbte movement which that show demonstrated he was
the leader. One critic then wrote that this was "without question
the most interesting photographic exhibition it has ever been our
lot to see* Its iafiuenee on British work is bouad to be a great one,**
It was.
R* CHILD
V. 291: A VISION THROUGH
PHOTOGRAPHY
TlEOtiTZ MADE PHOTOGRAPHY something more universal than the
draftsmanship of light, controlled through use of lenses,
darkened enclosures, sensitive surfaces, and chemical processes* In
him it became the act of vision, of life itself, by which all things,
all relationships might be focused at a timeless moment in their
flux, held as the artist holds his picture: a vision of the world serv
ing as a challenge, a guide, a corrective, and an incentive. In this
second phaseof photography as method, as philosophy of truth
the materials on which Stieglitz worked became human beings, and
their relations to one another, the abstract and timeless constantly
emerging from the most personal, the most deeply intimate.
The history of this evolution, a$ a public demonstration in Amer
ica! falls roughly ia two periods. The first extends from 1890, when,
twenty-seven, Stieglitz returned to America from Europe,
where he had absorbed with passion the contemporary culture and
had become famous ia his use of the camera. His first International
competition medal one of 150 he won in capitals of the world
from Paris to Calcutta had been awarded to Mm by P, H. Emer
son, author of the revolutionary Ntfwo&ftV Photography.
During this first period here, Stieglitz encountered the stale cul
tural that this country then wai; business ethics, those
of the criminal thinly veneered with social complacence, guiding
iEduitriiliim} labor unions fighting a battle in which the
true tad workman were threatened with extinction*
In the of such a society Sticg litz conducted his world-wide
to achieve the recognition ol photography a$ an art equivalent
to the other arts. To this end he shaped and led a succession
10$
xo6 AMERICA AND ALFRED ST1EGLITZ
of groups. The Camera Club of New York, the Photo-Secession*
and the International Linked Ring. The foremost art museums in
America and in the capitals of the world were opened to receive
photography on a parity with painting and sculpture* In America,
the serious, devoted* and accomplished workers whom Sticglitz in
spired and led, fought and broke the exhibition system that then
prevailed, with its emphasis on medals* awards, and wire-pulling,
and established standards of workmanship that were acknowledged
to be without equal anywhere*
As an individual worker Sticglitss hud from the outset deepened
and enriched the resources of the medium* Independently, and
simultaneously with Paul Martin in 1895, he was the first to intro
duce figures in night photography. His in
and rainstorms, until then aever on city and in
raikoad yard% for their and for
their wistful and of
As part of the activity, a
of the cultural history he was In the six
of tad the fifty of Worfa
quarterly is contained the vision of an idea in
evolution* an immediate projection in definite form of elements
in human relations which would otherwise not have hccn mrordcd.
from the marvel* of printing and reproductive invention ami
sensibility which pericxttcal* are, they represent the photo*
graphic method applied u record* even to of
criticisms on the and held.
The battle to officially and
as a medium of intimate, and lyrical
sion was won. It* and the nf
what had in the of the a* art was
1910* at the of Art,
M Y. in what ww tn be an
the of and!
to by in all of the
The the was
to T. the one of the
and I db he of the
29i : A VISION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY 107
Largely to one man does the success of the Buffalo Exhibition, with
all that that implies, belong. Over twenty-five years ago he recognised
the possibility of photography. He realised that there were many persons
who^if they came to regard photography seriously as a possible means
of original pictorial expression, would give to the world individual con
ceptions o the beautiful that could be produced through no other method
and for which the race would be richer; and that through a medium
with which the general public was more intimately familiar than with
any other, the public taste could through understanding be trained to a
keener and truer and more catholic perception of beauty in all fields of
artistic expression; and ? furthermore^ through such education of artistic
perceptions to emphasise the principle that a large class of paintings
many of which are even housed in art galleries will be superseded by
works produced more beautifully and less mechanically through the
medium of photography. This was the germination of the Secessionist^
idea. Through writings and exhibitions that battle was begun and tire
lessly waged with this end in view; and so it has gone on tirelessly for
a quarter of a century, to be finally crowned with this splendid achieve
mentthe Buffalo Exhibition.
Keiley gives m a picture of himself, sitting dreaming, in the
museum that housed "such an exhibition as will never again be
gotten together.**
Visible to me were the creative forces behind til of these pictures die
lives that hid into their making. Mmj o these forces were warring
with warring with other, seeking violently to rend the
wkile wander. Muy of thctn t ppaitntljr, If left to themselves, would
have their own work. Cloudi of jealousies from time to time
cibicured the whole. But all the while central force held die mass
togcther t drawing out and shaping the best work* helping
who stumbled and uniting all the complex, imaginative energy
into one purpofttful whole toward* a definite end. This central observing,
guiding mind appeared to tee and understand the evolving minds about
him, and to lie endeavoring to evoke for etch that which wa$ finest and
ft be to make t%i er an ^ ^ mr m & immortal,
an he and planned a itructure teemed to be growing
hii bttUdiag^and til the while his eyet were ixed on a distant
a light, which was the glow ol Beauty,
of $tigtttz had contributed to this
Oft % when the Royal Photographic
io8 AMERICA AND ALFRED ST1EGLITZ
Society of Great Britain conferred on him its highest honor, the
Progress Medal, for
. * services rendered in founding and fostering Pictorial Photography
in America, and particularly for your initiation and publication of
Camera Wor^ t the most artistic record of Photography ever attempted*
A MEDIUM, PHOTOGRAPHY ITSELF, could not circumscrite what Stieg*
litz was creating. From the outset he had undertaken to establish
photography, not exclusively^ but in the comity of the arts, among
other forms of utterance. Photographers could not understand the
evolution of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, at 291 Fifth
Aveauc, into "agi,* 1 where new and unknown painters, sculptors,
writers* were shown in exhibition! that to be
and crowding out photographic exhibitions,
Photographer n he was tad remained^ found himself
championing the living routine, institutional
ness, poMcai inertia, whether in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
under Sir Pardon Clarke, or in the ranks of the photographers
seemingly close to him. What he came to be fighting for was itie
spirit animating true explorers and creators in the arts, without
which photography itself, however accepted in museums, could not
exist* A living consciousness, expressed in relations, perceptions* not
dead pictures in whatever medium recorded* the
It has occurred to rnc that* lavishly as he hiiiwclf mi
Stieglitz'i friendship was reserved for a living principle that
transcended any individual. At various times it
rtphy, the truth, a spirit, Woman v even America* To champion thai
of life he had to contend, at with individual
he ever knew, The involved in his
and no life was ever less than
by and Yet the
into what be as a a
Sb| 391, a in first tht*
of a by
api : A VISION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY 109
such a casual commentator as Huneker as being among "the choir
o mystics" of William Blake, it was the quality of imagination in
her work, of direct feeling as against the "autocracy of convention,"
that determined her being shown.
A succession of exhibitions followed, with Steichen, who had
photographed Rodin, sending Rodin's drawings from Paris, and the
paintings of Matisse, a leader of the fauves, the "wild animals."
The sequence led quite naturally into a further series of demon
strations that included the salients of living contemporary painting
and sculpture. Taken individually, the exhibitions, given the public
in a setting of exquisite taste, designed to liberate the character
and quality of each artist or group shown, were bright, pulsating
events In the dead sea of New York commercialism. Taken to
gether* they gave to New York, and to America tens of thousands
of people from all parts of the country attended these exhibitions
mi opportunity to sec the organic evolution of contemporary Euro
pean expression.
The roster of artists and work first shown in America at 291,
many o the one-man shows being world premieres, included all
those forces which were later to be emphasized as the basic im
pulses in the revolt from academicism: C6sanne, Matisse, both as
painter and sculptor, Picasso, Braque, Toulouse-Lautrec* Henri
Rousseau* Severial, Picabia* Moreover, the relationship of these
workers and tendencies to other racial sources was documented in
the first exhibition anywhere a$ art and not as anthropology, of
Negro sculpture, On the other hand, the inquest Into the expressive-
nct* of the race aad the of what is known as art education,
brought the pioneer exhibitloni of the work of young* un
taught children*
The world grouped the tendencies being unfolded and gave them
nawes^PoitJmpressionlsm* 1 ; "Modern Art/* which was later to
a label But what was being exhibited at 291
t of liberating and questing experiences. These included
the return to In the use of, and respect for, media a
of and intonation breaking the molds of the
buckeye pdnttatgt of Meisionier* Rota Bonheur, Greuxe, then fa
vored by the Metropolis n Muieum of Art and academic circles
generally, la the too* the exhibitions served as a prophetic
no AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
notation on the ferment then stirring in the souls o those most
finely attuned to the psychic life o humanity* It was a ferment
presaging the era of violence and insanity into which the world
was to plunge.
Moreover, conducted with scrupulous exactitude and respect for
the individuality of the workers and the work shown* in a truly
photographic spirit, the scries of exhibitions continued to explore
and basically affirm the legitimate claims of Photography as a
medium founded in, vision, capable of exact record* responsive to
any depth or subtlety o feeling and potentially a challenge to the
entire assumption that human culture and concepts were primarily
a verbal logic.
The attitude of the opposed and reactionary New York surround
ing this oasis of vital experience and inquiry was well
in an Interview with Sir Purdon Clarke* director o the Metropolitan
Museum, who had appointed the friendship of
J, P* Morgan, This museum director, in an Interview by
W&r^t declared:
There is a of all the world In art as in all
things* It is the in literature ts in in in
sculpture- And 1 dislike unrest
His dislike of unrest had a wide and the poet
Browning, the music of Richard Wagner* As for Blake* a
drawing is not worth the paper it is primed on.* 1
It was with luch m dominant in the
that the vital American creative had to conccndL For out of
the of exhibitions at )i came a group cif
of them* like Alfred and Arthur Dove,
and powerfully in their by the of
like John the of
and the
in the cif
391 to give and
their first
they were the kit and mm vital tint
hid to The test a the oC
agi : A VISION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY in
something distinctively national, a potential flowering akin to
those utterances in wliich nations of the past had come to their
own timeless and essential character.
Insensibly, almost, Stieglitz found himself fighting for the very
existence of the living spirit in America. The personalities that
emerged from his tests were not lightly accepted. They had to be
judged by standards derived from the most exalted expression the
world knew. Their sincerity, stamina, vitality, and power to grow
were tested in successive yearly exhibitions attended by hosts of
the most enlightened and critical people in New York for the 291
scries of demonstrations were the very spark of life in the New
York art season, a center of discussions and rages, a source of
lengthy controversy in the press, of which Camera Worf^ preserves
a full and detailed record.
Whatever o life and vital impulse came to America, or out of
America, was fatally and inevitably attracted to the small exhibition
rooms and the burning spirit that centered there. So it was that
drawings sent rom Texas by a young woman to a friend in New
York, with the injunction to show them to no one, came to Stieg
litz the friend felt he must see them. "Finally, a woman
on paper,*' Stiegiitx exclaimed, recognising at once their profound
significance. In this way, after he had examined the drawings daily
for months, and ahowa them to many sensitive people, to make
sure they really contained what he felt was there, came about the
first exhibition o Georgia OTteeffe,
And In the of the entire demonstration* at 291, all those
and in Europe* futurism^ dadaism,
vorticism, cubism, urr&liim, found their primary Impulses regis
tered, In the field o letters Camera Wor\ published the earliest
work of Gertrude Stein, interpreting in her peculiar prose
the work of and Matisse*
Continuing its photographic evolution, 291 showed 10 Its con
cluding the photography of Paul Strand* to whom two num
ber! of Work were given, the only young American
then felt to be contributing something vital in that
tilde from It it characteristic of the rigorous
of that Mi work alone, of all the many
work is in the Camera
m AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
reproductions, is aot adequately represented, none of his later work
being reproduced.
As the war of 1914 approached, and the disruptive forces of the
world were expressed and reflected in the group represented by and
surrounding 1 291, Stieglitz gathered a consensus of expression con
cerning the spirit animating its work and essence. He asked twenty
or thirty peopleand more volunteered until the total reached
sixty-eightr-to write what 291 meant to them, eliminating if pos
sible reference to himself The resulting Camera Warf( 47* dated
July,, 1914, and published in January, 19x5, entitled "What is 291 ? lf
constitutes as comprehensive ami penetrating a cross-seetion of
spiritual America as can be found* It was testimony to the free ami
inquiring spirit, the liberation from dominant commercialism* the
reality of art, the fellowship and tolerance, the undeviating direc
tion that people had found there in brilliant, vital, pioneering yean*
The individual contributors to the symposium we shown In their
varying grasp of the central multi-racial in its
scope. The book, opening with Mabel from the
Negro eierotor boy at 391, Eirnon f contributbn is
one of the and perceptive the volume to
J, P* Morgan's librarian, Belle Greene; from a toker*
Meyer, Jr., later a governor of the Federal Reserve to a man
In jail on Blackwell's Island, for political "crime." Artists, writers,
photographers, teachers and engineers, anarchist! and journalists,
merchants, lecturer^ soldiers of fortune* clergymen*
radicals and conservatives, Frenchmen, Englishmen, South Amer
icans, Ger3man$ all testified to the reality and vitality of the living
spirit of freedom! tolerance, vital experiment which had ound a
home at 391 *
3
I MIT in 1917. Pawl me to ap Fifth
where, in a long m Fifth
of oft the the wall
and the uf Fifth Avenue
and 10 to awl war*
in the ilto of 391 had
coat up* nil
391: A VISION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY 113
As the disintegration of wartime progressed, there were many
evenings on which Stieglitz took Strand and myself on walks, long
walks in the city streets, often terminating in some small restaurant,
where we sat entranced as this man unfolded by the hour stories
out of his life, the substance of his experience of men, of women,
of art, and of life.
Once I accompanied him to his home, a long walk at night up
Fifth Avenue, to the apartment where he lived, isolated from his
family, in a single room, every available inch of wall space crowded
with pictures. There he drew out the drawings of Georgia O'Keeffe
and with passion pointed out the new language in which the
course of a woman's life was being unfolded,
Later I knew that he was living in a small studio belonging to
his niece, and that O'Keeffe was with him, painting. Their life in
the small rooms had the quality of the brilliant whiteness of the
walk. Writers, painters, photographers, people of all sorts still
sought him out. Privacy in the ordinary sense seemed hardly to
exist for Stieglitz, He was on call, seemingly at any hour, any day,
for anyone who chose to participate in the experience he was having.
Theflt and when he and O'Kceffc had moved into rooms put at
their disposal on the top floors of his brothers house in East 6$th
Street* StiegEtz continued his demonstration. People of all kinds
came from all parti of the world to the red-carpeted room on die
top floor of the Bait 65th Street house! people known and un
known : Sherwood Anderson, Gilbert Canaan, Carl Sandburg, John
Marin, Arthur Dove, the oompoier Ernest Bloch, Walter Lipp-
mania, David Liebovitz, Gitton and Madame Lachaise, the orches
tral conductor Leopold Stokowskl All the activities o men were
and many of men* Stieglitz was photographing;
Q'Kieclfe was painting.
would talk to hours^ for entire days, and hds talk would
be in of exposition to two or tea or twenty
oa the couch, occupying what chtirs there were,
in on the floor* People came # departed, stayed till the
hours*
When he to supper, ts for a time he did regularly at the
on Calumbtit Circle there would be from two
to i Um* There had been ruptures of
H4 AMERICA AND ALFRED ST1EGLITZ
friendship, people had gone out of his life never to return. Some
did turn up out of the past.
A nucleus of workers was again building* There were the
photography of Stieglitz and the painting of O'Kceffe as a rallying
point, and the austere simplicity of their life. For some reason those
who wrote, painted, photographed* and many who did none of
these things, felt impelled to bring their works, or if not their works
then their human problems, to Stieglitss. Perhaps It was because
they felt he was the only person in America, if not in the wH
who would receive them in a disinterested a photographic spirit^
for very nearly exactly what they actually were,
He released forces for O'fCeeffc that found expression in her
paintings, and in him she released the pent-up torments of years*
She served as his model, and in the of photograph* that
to issue from the relationship was a mtaute a siow*motion
documentation! using all the of a of photo
graphic of the was
committing to canvas*
Meanwhile* the oi who had the
evolution o the
t that on OI John
Marin and Georgia Q*Keeffe may be held
the task of continuing hit demonntratbn by
and other free ami creative alive in America*
Matin's work had shown every year his first a|f
exhibition, In the erf an exhibition of his own, and
the impulsion to whether not
the responsibility for which
of to lite and work*
of Marin at what was then one of the
in the city, the and
and i 01
tip tlit oC the
Will the and
and 10 t for
or and 10 till litr *t or
tit day* the w*i as god self*
a ii the It
2pi : A VISION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY 115
For those who took part in these occasions it was experience of an
unique character in the interaction o various personalities and
in the subtle effect upon each other o pictures and colors and
forms.
The successive Marin exhibitions were one of the foremost events
in the New York art season. It was recognized that in him America
had produced a master of water color, one to be ranked with its
supreme adepts, the Chinese. For Stieglitz, Marin, as he grew, be
came more and more a symbol In himself, Marin was the true, free,
joyous, and simple human being, whom it became a necessity to
enable to live, as a flower is cared for, or a tree bearing fruit. He
represented, too, all artists, purity of spirit and mastery itself, in
America, The logic of his situation was clear. If this supreme in
stance of creative genius and integrity could not survive in America,
freed from the degrading and destructive exactions of business, then
what chance could there be for lesser strength or for any honest
workman?
The successive exhibitions proved that only Stieglitz could cope
with the spiritual and the material problems that must be dealt
with in Maria's behalf* Just; us he alone could inspire and protect
G'KccffC) who became he song of liberation for all women. Some
thing was being kept; alive by Stieglitz and around him, in the
yearn that followed the World War* that seemingly found small
support or tolerance elsewhere.
The accumulating pictures^ his own, those of Q'Keeffe and
Marin, of Hartley, Dove, and others, formed an increasing pressure
upon Stieglte to find a new place where the public could adequately
see the work being done and help the workers to live* Mitchell
Ketmerley, then president of the Anderson Galleries, at Park
Avenue and fifty-ninth Street, spoke the decisive word, He offered
Stieglitz two rooms on the top -floor of the building for a
summing up of his photographic work* Here, on February % 1921,
wot *An Exhibition of Photography by Alfred Stieglitz
145 prints, over ia8 of whlcl* have never been publicly shown,
from i886~xgax. M
The catalogue was with a ^Statement*" which is so
that It follows;
06 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGL1TZ
This exhibition is the sharp focussing of an idea* . . *
The Exhibition is photographic throughout. My tetchors have beea
life work continuous experiment. Incidentally a great deal of hard
thinking. Any one can build on this experience with means available
to all
Many of my prints exist in one example only* Negatives of the early
work have nearly all been lost or destroyed. There are but few of my
early prints still in existence* Every print I make, tven from one nega
tive, is t new experience, a new problem, For, unless I am able to vary
add I am not interested. There is no mtthamcali&ition, but always
photography.
My ideal is to achieve the ability to produce numberless print! from
each negative, prints all significantly alive, yet indtstinguishahty sltke*
and to be able to circulate them at it price not higher than that of a
popular magazine, or even t daily paper* To gain that ability there hat
been no choice but to follow the road I have chosen.
1 was born in Hoboken. I am an American* Photography is my
ptssion* The search for Truth iny
The ahibitioa the of
with the European prints la hit nudfent years* it included
of family, Victorian rooms,
from the winclowi of sn which he had lived. It docu
mented the first photographic mastery erf modern chic* and in-
dlustriaiitm* One entire section was devoted! to the pcrsonalitsc* wltc>
had in one way or other purl of 291, another to
to 8tie#iit% momentarily or over
Undoubtedly that part of the exhibitk>n 9
the genera! tlik t "A l)cmon*tratbn of PonrHtturey* 1 in which it
portrait was shown It* of it two ami in
twentyfivc cir m
Hirtcli, all undi of ctte
hunuin Unly with a nf an
tm the in mil ciut nf the
A few
of the lit the
still id be
wai
by will antl t* the
291: A VISION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY 117
where many visitors forgot that it was pictures or photography
they were looking at and felt themselves in the presence of Life
itself. It was a revelation of vision in which all things could exist
in their peculiar character and essential beauty. It showed that the
very contour of the animate and inanimate world carried its story
of essence, that the hidden was revealed, and that the tangible,
real, and visible bore on its face the symbol of the invisible and
inexpressible.
As for portraiture, traditional conceptions of it were shattered at
one blow. The Stieglitz portraits evoked characters comparable only
to the studies in the unconscious of the great psychological novelists
and of the Freudian school of psychoanalysis* These portraits, and
those that Stieglitz was to make in the succeeding years, further
demolished the thin, conceptual, intellectual notion of human ex
perience* Some* who were brought face to face with themselves in
these notations, felt and suddenly recognized their hidden selves
made visible, a perfectly clear presentation in terms no words had
reached or could reach. The relativity of this work was plain to be
gcenu Of a scries of prints constituting a portrait, no one could be
said to be more final, more characteristic, than any other. Nor
was the portrait confined to the face* Any part of the body was
In its revelation of the characteristic, timeless, essential being
that the Individual was, and the moment chosen, die psychic state
of the subject^ the light o the month* the day and the hour, the
very tonality and intensity o the print played their parts in this
attestation ol the fluid elements of experience. Clearly here was
something no other medium could even attempt and something ao
other photographer had ever dreamed o
The exhibition a sensation in New York, Kennerky had
arranged an exhibition and auction o "old master" drawings in an
adjoining room, and the highly group of visitors to this
iihowing augmented the crowds who flocked wondering into the
hall o miracles, Articles and interviews in the press, and
eventually In to the profound effect of this demon-
Tfa0 exMHtiottt also held in the Anderson Gal-
116 prints, ol which 115 had never been publicly
It an entire itxtion, * large one, devoted to por-
1x8 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
traits (four to twenty-five prints in a portrait) o women, notably
those of Georgia O'KecflfC) a section devoted to men, among them
John Marin, Sherwood Anderson, Marcel Duchamp, and Charles
Demuth 9 a miscellaneous section, one devoted to small prints and,
most significant of all **Muslc A Sequence of Ten Cloud Photo
graphs*"
The significance of the title and the genesis of the cloud entities
is set forth in a letter which Stleglitx wrote to R. Child Bayley,
editor o The Amateur Photographer (London) and published in
that magazine September 19, 1913. Stieglitg stresses two motives
which led to the cloud photographs; first, a written statement by
one of his friends to the effect that much of the power of his
photography consisted in his influence over his sitters; second, a
remark by his brother-in-law* asking how one so musical as Stieg-
litz could do without a piano:
Thirty-five or more ago I spent a few in Murren [Switzer
land] and 1 was experimenting with Clouds and their rela
tionship to the rest of the world* and for
me, and elouds which were difficult to -nearly
sible. Ever then elouds have in my mind powerfully at
timeSt and I always knew I'd follow up the experiment made over 3$
yean ago, I ilwayi watched clouds* Smelted them. Had unusual oppor*
tunities up here on this hillside. [lake Cieorge.]
My mother was dying. Our place win going to pieces* The old horse
,of 37 wai being kepi alive by the 7o*yearold coachman* I full of the
feeling of all about me tibintegratioiv^low but
chestnut the chestnut* in this country have ttr dying ibf
yean: the pines doomed I f pctm* (tut at tit
in i great mess; die human being a ijuerr m m
our giant cheitnut tree on the tiifi
^ So I made up my I'd Mr, and my hrt>thrin<!aw.
I'd finally cb I had in fur J*d of
cloud 1 told Mim ctf my I tt
to fiml 0m I had in 411 nhcmt
put my of Iifct0 that iny
wrrr not clue tti tit or
or to ww there fur
ACI til as fft m
80 1 10 the and it w*i
291 : A VISION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY 119
daily for weeks. Every time I developed I was so wrought up, always
believing I had nearly gotten what I was after but had failed. A most
tantalising sequence of days and weeks. I knew exactly what I was
after. I had told Miss O'Keeffe I wanted a series of photographs which
when seen by Ernest Bloch (the great composer) he would exclaim:
Musicl musicl Man, why that is music! How did you ever do that?
And he would point to violins, and flutes, and oboes, and brass, full of
enthusiasm, and would say he'd have to write a symphony called
"Clouds." Not like Debussy's but much, much more. And when finally
1 had my series of ten photographs printed, and Bloch saw them what
I said I wanted to happen happened verbatim.
People meanwhile were asking that the work of O'KeeflEe be
exhibited. Sticglitas, on January 29, 1923, in the Anderson Galleries,
presented "One hundred pictures, oils, water colors, pastels and
drawings, 11 by Georgia O'Keeffe, American. There was no cata
logue, the pictures had no titles, but the announcement republished
the masterly essay on G'Keeffe from Marsden Hartley's Adventure
in the Arts* a book published in 1921, assembled out of Hartley's
published and unpublished essays at the instance of Stieglitz.
As G*Keeffe herself wrote in the announcement, she had found
first thatf though she was restrained from living where she wanted
tOi saying what she wanted to, doing what she wanted to, she could
at least paint a* she wanted to; and as she did so, she found she
could "lay things with color and shapes that I couldn't say in any
other way-HtWngi that I had no words for, 1 '
To Hartley the pictures were "probably as living and shameless
private documents ai exist, in painting certainly, and probably in
any other art* By 1 mean unqualiied nakedness t>f
He found O'Keefte nearer St. Theresa's version of life
at than to that of Catherine the Great or Lucrezia
m emeralds. She wears too much
white; the !$ impaled with a white consciousness* . . . She has wished
too md the world altogether too small in comparison.
The of this and the subsequent O'Keeffe
her as the essential reality which the so*
movement now partially at least historic was
120 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGL1TZ
groping for and about. Woman's experience, as biologically and
spiritually distinct from man's, was set down, boldly, exquisitely,
clearly. Oscar Blueraner, himself a painter, wrote that she had
. . the classical conception of Life the DIonysian cult beyond the
confines of the human body. . * . The human form and face as motifs
avoided yet presented in every flower, tree, pebble, cloud, wall, hill, wave,
thing- . * The Feminine Principle has only occasionally stepped out
from its retreat behind the scenes to lighten up an age* a race. , . .
Hie third exhibition of photography by Stieglita% like its prede
cessors held in the Anderson Galleries, beginning March 3, 1924,
added a miraculous series o tiny "Songs of the Sky Secrets oC
the Skies as Revealed by My Camera and Other Prints/* to the
Cloud Music. Included in this exhibition was a print named
Spiritual America, which showed iu uncanny detail the coat, the
individual hairs, the and the tlufty^even-ycar-old
gelded at hauntingly perfect statement. ^
The announced an event of In
with the advancement o photography; that one of the
conservative of art in the United the Bonton
Museum of Fiae Arts had acquired a comprehensive collection of,
27 photographs by Stieglit/* given by Stkgllr/, in rcaponar to the
enthusiasm of Ananda Coomarawamy curator of Oriental an.
AMP out of the
and O'Keetife and Marin exJiibitioiis, the fncui of American sjiirituil
and psychic life which they had income* Ird to
hii prol)lcm to Kcnntrky* who offered n witall
m the thirii ffexir of the CtiiSlcriei, the
cf the ai any lite
of tbli was In with a by
of "Seven ami
and the til*
am!
2 9 n A VISION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY 121
The exhibition summed up the exploration extending through
the long years of the Photo-Secession and 291; it demonstrated that
the creative Americans discovered and evolved during that inter
national search conducted in a photographic spirit were alive, grow
ing in maturity and power, and voicing on American soil something
not to be found elsewhere in the world. This aspect of it was
stressed by Arnold RSnnebeck, sculptor, later director of the Denver
Museum of Art, who wrote of it:
These Seven Americans are explorers, ... I believe their creative self-
tliscovory means nothing less than the discovery of America's inde
pendent r61e in the History of Art.
The spirit in which the work was done and shown is reflected in
what Arthur Dove, one of the Seven, wrote for the catalogue:
A WAY TO LOOK. AT THINGS
We have not yet made shoes that fit lil(c sand
Nor dothcs that fit li^f water
Nor thoughts that fit lifye air.
There is much to be dam*-*
Worfff of nature are abstract.
They do not le&n on other things for meanings.
The sefrgult is not tl^c the sea
Nor the sun lifyt the moon*
TAff sun draw w&tm* from the sea.
The cloudf am not lH(e either one***
TA^y do not \0ep one form former.
Thai the momtmnside looty Ufa a face is accidental*
In the "Equivalents," by which name Stieglitz designated the
imaiU prints he showed in this exhibition* he extended the concept
of Mi photography* The prints included pictures of natural objects,
clcmd% a poplar tree, its leaves shimmering in wind and sunlight,
which were recognised as portraits* The translation of experience
through photography, the storing up oi energy, feeling, memory,
impulse* will f which could find through subject matter later
presenting itielf to the photographer, were thus made evident* This
should have for all time the silly and unthinking talk to
the that the photographer was Emited to a literal transcript
of what wts before him.
122 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
Stleglitz's statement in the catalogue of the "Seven Americans'*
exhibition read:
These photographs continue the search for my Truth -Photography*
5
THE NEW CENTER, Room 303 in the Anderson Galleries, was opened
to the public on December 7, 1925, with a John Mar in exhibition,
under the name, "The Intimate Gallery/* The intimate, the private,
the personal as always with Stieglitx and the public* were
brought into direct juxtaposition.
The announcement stated that the gallery would be u$ed more
particularly for the study of Seven Americans: Maria, G'Keeife,
e^ Hartley, Strand, Stiegiitsr and Number Seven*
It will be in the Intimate Gallery only thai the evolution and
the more important of American workers can be
and studied.
Intimacy and Coneentration f we bellevej in this will a
broader appnwiatfon. Thii to a wider distribution* of the
The latimate Gallery will k Direct Point o Public
tad Artbt It is the Artists* Room*
It was stressed that the Intimate Gallery was not a nor
a "social 1 * (in the narrow sense) function, nor was it
with anything or anyone.
The choice of Mario as the first, the typical and representative
creative spirit for presentation in this new center of radiation lay
In the inevitable line of the entire evolution*
and widely acclaimed a* u water color!*** He WAS
mcire and more frequently with the of
wash, the Chinese; moreover! he was a
in the of had used m
to oil which in the be* of the
had a 0!
who had to fight out in the life of an
tad i was that
bit ol In and the
291 : A VISION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY 123
soaring, turbulent, chaotic, steel-pinnacled New York. Utilizing the
unitary emotional structure that made a Cezanne water color,
Marin had Infused his work with higher tensions, characteristic
American shocks o shape and color, derived from speed, the
various stresses o the American psyche. By common consent and
recognition, Marin had become a master, one whose complete evolu
tion had been shown by Stieglitz in yearly exhibitions, one who
by right represented the spirit Stieglitz had been fostering and
championing.
The Intimate Gallery enlarged the scope, more fiercely directed
the focus of the 291 experimentation and exposition. In this room,
perhaps twelve feet by twenty in dimension, was being tested the
possibility of the life o the spirit in America, Situated as.it was,
in the very heart of New York, in a building devoted to auctions
o pictures, furniture, jewelry, and other articles of luxury, it had
a quality of the surgical operating room and of a sanctuary. Clusters
of electric lights glittered overhead throughout the day. The win
dows looked out on Park Avenue, whose traffic roar could be
heard, even m buildings were torn down and skyscrapers erected in
plain view. And at Intervals the room could be entirely silent with
a silvery magic in which the pictures or sculpture being shown
lived the life of reality and imagination*
It wai part of the spirit of photography, animating and guiding
thii place f that it became a confessional, a resort of many who came,
they knew not why, and, suddenly, without reserve, would find
unfolding such a story of themselves, of their intimate
loves, frustrations, of the sum and substance of
their as rarely confess to themselvesi never to an
other. On one occasion* the Rumanian sculptor, Brancusi, his head
like that of a Christ, talking with Stieglite, said quietly;
"Ante jf suit Kb?*!'
at the Intimate Gallery was fighting for the very lives of
the and for a value in the lives of multitudes who depended
on whether they knew it or not, there was time always
for the the crystallisation and revelation of life. The
whether America, richest nation o
the worM, whether New York, most lavish and luxurious city
Its wealth in the very building in which the Intimate
i2 4 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEQLITZ
Gallery was situated, would give the creative spirit bread* However
the pressures accumulated, and they became intense sometimes be
yond the breaking point, this living focus was maintained
For it was not mere economic sustenance that the Intimate Gal
lery was standing for, it was the relationship of the divinity in
men and women as represented by the creative artist, with the
entire nation and the life of the world* In this room the palmers,
sculptors, and others of all arts and professions who gathered about
it s were submitting themselves and their productions to the test of
truth, Sticglitz alone was there to receive and to preserve. It was
his spirit photographicthat enabled the picture to live its own
life in relation to other works, that evoked from those with whom
he came in contact of themselves of which they had never
become aware. In the succession of exhibition* held during the
six years of the Intimate Gallery* in which other* the
primary six were shown Lachaise, ltacon Rhiemner,
Francis Picabift, European link with 391 the primary Idea niant-
est In til its variants OSR a item of warning*
The civilization that or its yield Its
to and
was in that its own damn* its own warrant,
la Stieglitz the work he was doing centered the hojic of
youth. And youth has rallied to him, as it elk! always. Now ttuit the
Intimate Gallery has into the of form* that
constituted the published private life of StirglitXi it it by
another, appropriately known by the simple name* An
Place. There, in a austere a* a crlK overlooking flic
architectural anarchy of midtown New York from the
floor of ttn office building at <$oc) Madison the is
sustained. The exhibitions go on, exhibitions not of
but of human relations* of fmiblicarkmi* i
the M Lettcrs of John Mariii, 11 the ^Dualities'* of Dorothy
by in very with the this
the polarity* the of iti
On, tie i the of iti
and torn by of and of and lin-
it wsts nftd that nw-
not or that
39* : A VISION THROUGH PHOTOGRAPHY 125
fed into the life of a people by the spirit of selfless inquiry, of
resolute giving, of the essential humanity by which alone nations
and peoples and races have come to life. Gathered and conserved
in and about Stieglitz were and are those ancient elements of the
spirit that cannot with impunity be denied; that make history and
that press forward into the future.
HERBERT J. SELIGMATSTST.
VI AN AMERICAN PLAGE
%/%/HEN YOU BNTKII Aa American Place the first thing you
f f feel is the quality of light* It cannot be because it ii high
up In an office building, for you have been elsewhere high up in
office buildings, and there was not that particular kind of light you
find when you enter An American Place,
You notice that the bare undecorated structure of the building
is the bare structure of the The is div into
well-proportioned o varying in
ihtpe* There arc without the one
imo the other without barrier* The in the
are from varying luminous to white* which
the light coming in through windows, no that with the
white tnd uncovered light gray
there pervades the a clear and subtly fluid ever varying glow
of light. Light and room are as one.
A angle threshold with door out of the larger
separating them from a smaller wetton. In this scxtitw there is
space, small* enclosed, windowlfas, painted black, with two open
ings: a aperture in ihr wall and a double threshold also with
out btnh equipped to he tightly m that m>
may be reflected iiwl arc
Ai art on the of the and
0m in <rf the are ind
The
imo this In
k* **An to all. It I* a
art but te day arc pic-
0ft lite a lidi
AN AMERICAN PLACE 127
at them suddenly addresses Stieglitz, who stands there as usual,
seemingly as integral a part of the Place as the walls themselves:
"This is a very exciting show. What else ought I to see in New
York?" Sticglitz replies; "I have no idea what else you ought to
see in New York." Woman: "Could you tell me, by any chance,
where Mr. Stieglitz's gallery is? I hear that he has the finest things
in New York, but I cannot find his gallery listed anywhere." "Mr,
Sticglitz has no gallery;* "You are mistaken. I was distinctly told
that he has, and that I must surely go there when I came to New
York." Sticglitz finally raises his voice: "Well, I ought to know. I
am Mr. Sticglitz, and I tell you he has no gallery." Mystified, the
woman departs, no further information forthcoming from Mr.
Stieglitz. Someone standing there, amid the laughter after she has
gone, asks why he -has allowed her to walk out without explaining
what he meant; that she looked well-dressed besides and might
have bought something. To which Stieglitz replies: "Something
more was at stake than her knowing where she was for the mo
ment* And I am not in business. I am not interested in exhibitions
and pictures. I am not a salesman, nor are the pictures here for
sale, although under certain circumstances certain pictures may be
acquired. But if people really seek something, really need a thing,
and there is something here that they actually seek and need, then
they will find it in time, The rest does not interest me." An Amer
ican Place is not luted in the telephone directory, one learns, for
the Identical i only if it is really needed, deeply needed* will
it be * * there ii no attempt made to advertise, to publicize.
Standing one of the large windows one day, looking out
upon the world forth More him, Stiegllte remarked: "If
what Is in here cannot itand up against what i* out there, then
what ii In here has no right to exist But if what is out there can
up what is In here, then what is in here does not
to ciist, 11
You to wonder what the out there, the In here, signify;
what Is ihc tent o what ii within, functioning as a force in relation
ship m ii without* You begin to wonder what this space
i% ao and so spoken of by a man: Stieglitz,
Whit the pictures* and what was at
Why dbc* the quality of the light seem significant, as if it
ia8 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
had some special meaning, the way light in a cathedral with its
unearthly, strange, concentrated quality seems to have a special
meaning? The dark room with its aperture and mystery might be
a confessional, and you hear people as they come in talking to
Sticglitz as if he were a father confessor. The bare clean walls
might be, save for the pictures, laboratory, hospital, model work
shop walls. Or again, the light rooms might, be a photographic
studio.! for there are cameras standing in a kind of vault, and the
dark room might be a photographic workroom. True, there are
some photographs standing about and hanging on the walls at
times, and there are on the shelves some volumes called Camem
Work Or i$ it possible that the books and the workshop atmosphere
signify that Stieglitss is a teacher and An American an educa
tional Institution? In some of the bonk* cm the shelves there is
mention of Stkglitx as a teacher, a educator* Or* with
the emphasis not put upon selling picture*! this is i
museum tod Siieglttz the curator* If the Is nut lif* surely,
then, it must be h* who and it.
But strangely even when are no no pic
tures, no m people; when* in short,
to be happening, somehow the of the
not to be in any way limited or by that fact*
One has but to ask Sticgltar, An American Place is* to IK
told, -What is life itself? What does life mean?*
Ami so in the of every man who An
there remains the question: What is it? AIM! each will his
own m before a work of art* i*r life itself mi-
catc#0ri&tble in no fur m they arr art and life.
Founded in npi) when Sfirgiiff. himself wa* nearly seventy. An
American Place until* Iwwcvcr* urrly bear clow* rcbticm*hip in
the activity erf Iii life; a
gtiifk:*ifif of that life, An Place
em be but the til thr
of i tradition* by and llir
and the ihm that
, . . In this
and all cif the a$
pity i aa pain of the
AN AMERICAN PLACE 09
But let us first, for a moment, examine the forces behind An
American Place: what is the essential meaning of what lives within
for that which lies outside the large windows; for America itself?
How is it identical with Stieglitz, and he with its essential mean
ing?
"WHAT DOES LIFE MIAN? What does life itself mean?" Stieglitz
replies.
And then suddenly you stop asking. You begin to listen to Stieg
litz ever more intently and not to waste time asking any more
questions. You begin quietly to look at the things at the Place and
at the Place itself and to absorb them without asking anything
about them, You begin to realize that it will take time. You begin
to realise that this is exactly what Stieglitz is telling the people to
do when they come to the Place and begin to ask him their ques
tions* He tells them how you cannot ask what life is, but you must
taste it, feel it, live it. You realize that he never answers the ques
tions but is always telling instead some story out of his life: that
1% out of hi* own experience, to illustrate what he cannot otherwise
tell them in answer to their questions, to which in turn they will
have to find their own answers, out of their own lives*
Someone will ask what a picture means, as one has oneself asked
what the Place means. "You will find as you go through life that
if you aftk what a thing means, a picture^ or music, or whatever,
you learn something about the people you ask, but as for
learning the thing you to I^now 9 you will have to sense
it in the end through your own experience, so that you had better
your energy and not go through the world asking what can
not be communicated in words* If the artist could describe in
words what he cbea then he would never have created it."
You begin to identify what Stieglitz m saying with what you
yourielf arc through the Place and about the Place- You
to that if you will only listen hard enough, look hard
enough, you will to know something that you cannot know
through You begin to sense that knowing the Place
ii in a living and not a knowing about something.
li it like life You begin to sec how, unless the
130 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
Place is part of your life, you canaot know anything about it, and
that to make it part of your life is not to talk about what it is but
to give yourself to it, even as you absorb it. You begin to realize
that as Stieglitz tells stories or parables or discoveries out o his
own life to illustrate what he cannot generalize about-, since the
abstract is dead, like telling something that does not come out of
your own body, he is creating life itself or art or whatever it is
one wishes to call it, which in turn must he understood and felt
and experienced as deeply as the thing he nevertheless illuminates
indirectly through his challenge to one to sec for oneself, experience
for oneself.
You cannot* for example* be told about such phenomena as sun
sets or love. You have to experience them with your own being*
And while you watch and feel, it is not the words and their mean
ing which are the abc that you arc preoccupied with* but with the
xyx which ii their and about which one cannot learn nave
through Even the of communicated
through their an equivalent o what have fclt which
we call art* or the trl o living, we unlit we have
ourselves ihc spirit of what **It
two to a trutk" we lay. 4 *A Yes to
Y> a No to 0ne f i No, that Is truth* But one find
corroboratloft for Yes, for No, until CHIC is clear within
tmeself as to what one 1 * own feeling is.**
You begin to feel Stkglir//s word* living
They preoccupy you. They beat within you, They are tti
you, the way a is added to you, or the wi$y that
moves you in people ii added to you. If bcwmc* part of you ao
that If you arc tut off from it you arc hurt* the wity you ire hurt
If pan of your body is ait off, and so you ir Ii
part of your body, the wiy It is m you you are with Ii
and you feel cut off from Si ii fo not there. You that
tic world not fee the Ii f for you are not the
yew were you It awl yew find cor-
y0ttr tfitl m you tint it Ii not |w*t i pr-
but a true You find lit
now In ind fa
by it two to i and w ptr me, ill true
AN AMERICAN PLACE 131
are equal to one another," because you understand about the cor-
roboration making a thing stand on its own feet outside your
personal feeling like a third thing, and you understand the pre-
dictableness of the effect this third thing will have upon others, so
that your truth will be equal to their truth, in the sense that it will
be the same truth, as the sunset you see is incontrovertibly there
for all and not merely in you. You begin to feel that this thing
that has been added to you is like all created work, an addition to
the world as- something that did not exist before; and you know
that the world will be both greater for its presence and less if it is
allowed to disappear. And you want to make certain it will remain
in the world, You begin to feel new life beating within you through
this thing you feel You sense that the new life must be born, All
criticismi all that we call art, is like that is born of a desire to
recreate what you have been given and it is this, too, that the
Place is saying and doing and making you feel you must do.
It Is as if An American Place were fertilizing people to say the
thing that it is saying, but each must say it anew each in his own
way* It is like a church where you give yourself to the thing that
frees you and you can give forth its spirit again only by continu
ing to build It in whatever farm is your form. It is the spirit and
not the letter that is the church and its name is of no consequence.
For what else is a church i it is not this?
You cannot keep that of new added life inside you, without
giving it to the world anew. It it like a law of life at work in you.
It is the counterpart of what feel when they come in and
feel that they cm tell all to which is what makes him a
without ever to be it You can tdl all to
him he all of himself to each* "You do to another as
does to you* 1 U one of St!eglto f s laws. The telling wiE be
the of it* But you find telling about it abortive. It kaves
you unsatisfied and to tell about it. You have to utt it, and
the hts to be part of your own life, the form your own life-
It ii all very well to try to tell what the Place is like, but what
it is like ii w at as the walls before you or the man
you 0r the on the walk You realixe you have to
You have m be able to recreate the original touch
of the itielf that you wish to reproduce. You have to train
132 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEOLITZ
yourself as for any other work. You have to give the magic that
you have felt. To reproduce is one step removed from creating the
original There must be a sense of responsibility towards the
creator, towards the original You begin to understand that Stieglitz
must mean this when he says that exhibitions and pictures do not
interest him* Graven images are graven images when they are pic
tures that make you remember that they are pictures and do not
carry you beyond to that throbbing essence which is the original
which is God. The medium must disappear, you yourself roust
disappear. And you will have 10 prepare yourself. The Place itself
teaches how the true artist in reality always li;ut a seme f rcsponsi*
bility towards his materials ami towards what he communicates
the spirit of. You will hear Stieglitx tell about how they cannot
reproduce his photographs in America they have no feeling
about the actual touch of things* It isn't part of life the way it is
lived today in America* You to thai Stiegliu tells
about hit not he it himself,
but his OWB is tit he at first hand, and
Mi is but t dE what he
on everywhere* These he hit own
md for thai is he and what lie knaws,
you to fed at of: the and you want
to get stories clown, fcwt you feel that you are
not a man and not si country hut universal
thing. He lias said "Beauty is the universal
Yei all the while you ecl the to get thing* down* ycm feet
thai short of thoroughly prepared* you wills with
nf preparation, but flic nf diir!t;mti*in IP
the is a Hut as there is *t ctuUrngct dilet
tantism and picturcimttkiiig and twn being prepared* so
is a "II yint really care a you
rf0 it. You dott'i lit it, you
Act The ace first and itie ward/ 1 "All of my life I
t out
fcrl y i am! db IIDI act in
the
you you can db you are
stilt you feel dk it ilitt the ywi
AN AMERICAN PLACE I33
sit spellbound by what Stieglitz is saying and by what is happening
at the Place, you should actually be communicating the man and
the Place to the world at large. It is a strange feeling to feel guilty
about absorbing the very center of the thing you want to com
municate. But that is what happens. You love the inevitability of
Stieglitz's replies to people who, when he challenges their avowals
of caring about something, by pointing out to them that they do
not care in reality, or they would do something about the thing
they claim to care about, ask, "But our lives are complicated. What
are we to do?** He will say, "You must do exactly as you are doing.
There is nothing else to do save what you are doing." He never has
a feeling that a person is good or evil because he has or has not
do tic a thing, but what he always challenges is the self-deception
involved in people's saying one thing and doing another and not
realizing that what they say about what they want to do is not
doing It.
You love tine inevitability until you find the knowledge that you
arc not deceiving yourself and that you really know that you want
to do what you say you want to do Is small recompense for not
doing what surges within you to be done* You wonder, "Have I it
straight within me, the subtlety of the line of what Stieglitz is say
ing? Can I remember it clearly? Can I recommunicate the spirit
the communication of the spirit of a thing being the very essence
of the spirit, of the Place?'* The challenge comes back: *lf you are
clear within yourself* you can, communicate clearly what you have
to say. If you are not clear within yourself you can communicate
nothing with clarity. 11
While Sticglitx is challenging he is not Uunking of you but of
a point where all people mcet~and then of the point even beyond
that It it this point beyond that you yourself wish to communicate
* . He challenge personally, but when you are with
him the mconingfuincss of his challenge strikes home, for in being
universal in implication it touch til men, even himself,
wham he must know the of what he says or
It will be a formulation, and short of being as
is it i the will scarcely reveal the
core of Mfe will be that concrete reality; beauty.
There is in a Impersonally given that will
134 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
"liberate where a sweeter personal promise of salvation would
paralyze, "To show the moment to itself is to liberate the moment,"
You listen and listen while you are at the Place* People come.
You hear the people as they talk in front of the pictures and when
they are not in front o the pictures. You listen to Stieglitz* You
hear what is said, but when you try to retell it later* something is
missing. Perhaps you do not quite know enough yet to include that
point beyond* You will have to wait until you have seen it under
all conditions and know the entire history of the Place, You begin
to read the history of the Place in its various previous forms, and
to hear Stieglit?* tell stories out of his life about the past* livery time
you think, "Now I have the essence/ 1 and then you come back, and
the sunset varies. You begin to feel hopeless about ever communi*
eating any of it, because every time that you sec lomcthing, hear
something, it U something basic that you die! not hear or ce before.
The patch of sky In the The sun ii the The landscape
Is the But the connantly. According to
the ability of to telli less or of
what is the whole of a of t *tory. He a utory
to point* and the {xrinti which any
one itory can illuminate vary* it
growing i conitantly deeply. Yen* grown> yourvelf*
Again the challenge: "There ii no thing a* the
if you really want to do a thing badly enough. If you have to do i
thing with all of your being, then you fine! a way, even if you have
to die far it Having tor that is the only wanting I recognise*" Or t
he will nay* "If you have ten mile* to walk, you must the
first mile firm. If you don't want let walk the firm mile but
the ten miki ill at tmcr* you wilt never even get started**
You arc you are told one miii
ing; how one must in CMC do, One
noc do anything that not **Wlwi
within will be fell But* It one with
the idea of else, one will that
nor That Ii the and
the and the tn t the
to db Tic ttic
by tn in in
AN AMERICAN PLACE 135
control; trying to live in the light, like the seed pushing up through
the earth will alone have roots, can alone be fertile. ... All
Idealism' that does not have such roots must be sterile; must de
feat itself. . . "
Someone after a conversation with Stieglitz asks him in wonder
who he is. Stieglitz replies, "I am the moment. I am the moment
with all of me and anyone is free to be the moment with me. I
want nothing from anyone. I have no theory about what the mo
ment should bring. I am not attempting to be in more than one
place at a time, I am merely the moment with all of me." And
again: "When I am no longer thinking but merely am, then I
may be said to be truly living; to be truly affirming life. Not to
know, but to let exist what is, that alone, perhaps, is truly to know."
How can this be reconciled with the challenges to do? He has
challenged one to be true to the moment, but always with a sense
o direction* "1 am a Fatalist, but with one eye on Fate,"
You begin to wonder why Stieglitz himself does not write his
own biography; then there would not be this inadequacy of others
doing something that they can never know the whole of. But
Stiegiite has various things to say about that* He says he is too busy
living his life to write it. He says that he does not want to write
his autobiography until he can sum up the whole of his life in one
page. He tells how if he could really put dowa the line of the moun
tain and sky as they touch, as he has seen it across Lake George from
his house on the Hill, it would include all of life, He tells how
he cannot write M$ autobiography because $o much of the actual
evidence of has been destroyed^ and he does not see how
one can trust one's memory about things in the past and tell exactly
what has happened. His diaries and so many of his letters have been
destroyed that he feels it would be futile to attempt to reconstruct
from memory, and, short of telling and showing everything, there
would be bound to be or appear to be a falsification* He has this
too to fay about autobiography: "Everyone has his blind spot and
until one knows what one's blind spot is, anything that one has to
sty must be meaningless/ 1 Then slowly you begin
to that die and Stieglitx are so much one thing all
the way that every story he tells, every photograph he
every incident at the Place, actually communicates the essence
z 3 6 AMERICA AND ALFRED SHEGLITZ
of the whole meaning o all of them, as well as that Insight into
that which we call the universal, without which added illumination
nothing whatever would have been communicated to begin with.
You realize that if you could tell but one incident, repeat one story
or discovery, communicate the meaning of but one photograph, by
Interpreting its meaning in full* with all of the implications clearly
included, you would communicate the essence of the whole thing*
And then the time arrives when, like the child that; comes forth
from the womb without one's having anything to say about it, the
life beating within one must be born or wither for all time. One
must face the consequences* One must accept the child for what
it i% even if it is not precisely the child one might; have wished to
bear; even if it in not perfect m it rears its unpredictcd head; even
if it will be difficult to say that it is this or it is that* if it it indeed
alive and has any living qualities whatsoever of its own. . * *
What else is Siieglte about work that one You hear
him tell about the mmi who complained a certain picture
was for one line, anil how the painter replied that
he knew that the line was but i lie a perfect
picture which included thai line painted perfectly! he would
not have had to paint the picture, "There arc two dc
at a thing* you feel that it thing be you
it to the public, or you arc willing lei let ii go not even
knowing that it is not you are for
thing even beyond what you have achieved, but in too
hard for perfection you know that you may lose the very glimmer
of liffi the very spirit of the thing that you utoo know it a
particular point in what you have done; and that to interfere with
it. would be in dentroy chat very living quality, 1 am mywlf in
favor of practicing in public* There *ire, of tour**, ihrmc people who
ittyi *ilii! tlic public is itot interested in watching practice.
It the linifthcd or nothing** My U if one
nut lit public in reality* in out of ten
the will re i tie of
get cut the that if it it not n pur
cent It tin! lw in itic but I
too that it per cent that
ami that
AN AMERICAN PLACE 137
plete that have life and vitality, which I prefer by far to the other
so-called perfect thing. It is one thing to think about a piece of
work as a scientific or objective entity that will stand up a hundred
years hence, and another to think of the living quality of the person
doing the thing and of his development. Is the thing felt does it
come out of an inner need an inner must? Is one ready to die
for it? . . . That is the only test. . . ."
Again, there is a sad chuckle: "Everywhere I find myself sur
rounded by perfect people. Question a single action, and you are
told that you are utterly mistaken to question. I suppose I am the
hie of Imperfection in a Sea of Perfection!' "It seems never to
occur to anyone to go into himself; to question himself. Automati
cally the other person is wrong. To grow more tolerant towards
others, stricter with oneself, seems unheard of. Freedom for all-
tolerance towards none, seems to be the slogan."
Again. A man stands before some paintings at the Place. He
points to one picture that has been recently painted and remarks
that he likes it better than the others, painted at an earlier stage
of the artist's development* Stieglitz turns to him; "I suppose you
like the full-blown flower better than the bud? I suppose you like
the Beethoven Ninth Symphony better than, the Beethoven First
Symphony? Such distinctions do not interest me. All of my life
I have been told such things; that sculpture is greater than paint
ing, because sculpture has a third dimension; that painting is
than photography, painting has color and photog
raphy ii 4 mechankaL* It is as if there were a great Noah's ark in
which every must be separated from every other species,
10 that finally, m they arc all placed in their separate cells, they
grow no scif-conicioui that finally, if one were to take them out and
put them together they would all fail upon one another and kill
each other, 11
While it a little the pain of erne's imperfections to hear these
concentrating upon the white light illuminating the
than in darkness what light one^finds,
still there a discipline to be adhered to, wherein the
i$ a* 11 the letter, save only with the difference that
the spirit buitdf while the letter destroys. Instead of reaching out
for that you do not feel within yourself, something that
I 3 8 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
is not bom out of your own body, there is the necessity to know
when to let your very child pursue its own inevitable course and
to stop trying to mould it into something that will kill the very
spirit you wish to let live. Just as knowing about a thing is not
the thing to center upon, but rather the absorbing of its spirit, and
the transforming one's knowledge into action* so imperfection and
perfection* agreeing or disagreeing, right or wrong are not the
things to center upon, but the spark of; life wherever one finds it,
and the letting live that spark of life in the creation of a man which
it is as essential to protect from death as the life of him who has
created it.
And as any single story must give the essence of the whole* so,
unless what holds true of what you have derived from the message
of the Place holds true of everything that you feel about life, and
its spirit is communicated to everything you do in your own life,
then what you say about anything else will be untrue to the spirit
of the Place, and what you nay about the Place will itself be uatruc
of the Place.
You YOU if AVI the of what you waat to lay within
you and that you arc writing down the man and the Place, tad
then you feel it is that elusive quality just beyond, you haven 1 !
quite captured* that m the core of it all . . ,
It would not be difficult to reconstruct any number of convincing
portraits of Sricglitz ami the Place, but the moment you try to pin
it all down and fit il into a theory or derive a theory from if, you
betray it, You can lake up the varying 0! what
nays and of what the Place is, and you can Ix? quire convincing, but
it will all be but a starting point for something beyond that yca
want to say*
There Is the title "An American Phtcr*" What it and
how il lo the of Sttegliu? You hear
tcl his for ami white he you
to MC lie hail in the of he
He teit he was it tie not to
tales but to read over and over of the
ican was his It wti
AN AMERICAN PLACE 139
the strategic retreats he made that fascinated Stieglitz, because,
without ever winning what is called a victory, Greene always de
feated the enemy. One quickly sees the significance of this early
reaction and how later he himself was to do likewise. Greene was
a corroboration, not an ideal There have been Stieglitz's own re
treats to victory. There was his necessity in photography at once
to withdraw from the orthodox methods in use at the time, and
in doing what had not been done before to create what those who
hud no such inner need, no such vision guiding them, and who kept
to the worn-out paths, did not create. He withdrew from business
because he would not be forced into doing imperfect work in order
to conform to the prevailing methods of business, for he could not
sec how in turning out great quantities of a thing at maximum
speed, without any respect for quality, one could do a job that was
"just as good as" the best one was capable of doing, which latter
alone could have any significance in a living way for any work
man. This feeling was no theory either, but was rather something
he felt within himself and that he heard corroborated by others
who had respect for their work and were not allowed to do the
best work of which they were capable under the prevailing spirit
that dominated business methods*
You will hear him tell how if people would only stop talking
about the brotherhood of man and talk more about the brother
hood of man and the machine, it would be a great deal better. He
will lay too how it U the workman and not the "worker" he cares
about, and hew if people would think more about their work and
less about their "Mean" md themselves, it would all be better too.
For at the time that he suffering himself from the
tyranny of the shoddy and heard others suffering too about act
allowed to do their best work, he also began to hear em
ployer! complain they could not find workmen who were
properly trained or about their work. It was a vicious circle,
which he did not allow to imprison him. He withdrew, his with
drawal a but in reality an affirmation of something positive.
Not he led whit wa< the Ph0tH$eces$ioa, its very name
(i sign of a into victory in a greater sphere
from a one. And then he withdrew from becoming part of
an art with all of modern art available to him for
140 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
little money he could have turned the whole of his work into a
material success rather than into a creative source. It is a retreat
all along the way from the personal and the sterile, to make room
for the larger than the personal and for the creative in the true
sense. In his own qualified use of the term true he has said how
all true things being equal to one another is the only democracy
he recognizes, and it was a democracy he was lighting for even
as had Nathanacl Greene- -but necessarily on his own terms*
And then there is a story you will hear him tell about how when
he went to Europe to study when he was young* he had his glorious
vision o America, inspired by his history btxtks, ami one imagines
by the natural patriotism of the young, as well* which with him
wts a passion* He defended everything American the
skepticism of the Europeans to whom! on the whole* America
not to be taken too seriously. A |>rufe**or who claimed to have
studied very carefully the principle* upon which the Brooklyn
had been built, maintained that tiicy faulty, predicting
the of the within five
the lie was noth
ing of the technical involved* who
the a thought the
he fell intuitively that the tic It wai lib
he was like a tits and
the America he envisioned was his tmn at in life,
though probably lie amid not have told you that
When lie returned to America later he found the
lyn Bridge standing* but, the America of his
to be found. He himself his, IMC! not IKWBII
the fairy talc of tlirni all,
we it deal the lie did
a of ittfltvitltwliiiti
and i of talk "cverywatt* 1 the
and *a tfiii had
him m a ami win to him * * *
in the f tic it tti
in life on the uml fttiti it was this tint Iwve th*tt lit
km tiu It is at the root of till tit like a
with liw for hit It ii ttti
AN AMERICAN PLACE 141
child not only because he has taken it to his heart, but too, because
it has sought him as parent. He has said, "They had promised me
something that I did not find, and all of my life has been spent
in search of that thing* even to the point where I have had to
create a world of my own, wherein the principles they preached to
me, can actually be practised."
It was not mechanization or business as such that he protested
against It was the sacrificing of the living spark, of the element of
clccp caring, of lovefor the dead and the non-caring, which robbed
all living beings of the throbbing contact of the alive with the alive,
on whatever terms and upon which contact the human being
depended for survival -that was a torture to him. One might say
that Stieglit/, fell in love with that which represented caring or love
in their simplest terms, for whatever man found himself in con
tact with to the existence o which love Stieglitz was innately
sensitive. It; was this love that moved him, and what moved him
he must photography must liberate. This is a center, a secret core
of his photography! o his life.
There is t portrait of a lorn street sweeper on a rainy spring day,
conscientiously plying his mule with all dignity and tenderness of
movement, ai tender as the young budding tree next to which he
stands* encased though it Is in what seems like a prison of wire
fencing* Behind him rise the buildings of a new world. There is a
constant song in his photographs of the ever present vestiges which
man somehow manages to preserve for himself, o the individual
in contact with and caressing the simple, the breathing, and the
enduring in life, in terms o its most fundamental being i in the
very of a new and brittle world encroaching upon it and to
which il cannot bend. There is the challenge to persist, to touch ? to
transform, the ever changing, ever new world with the light o
ltivc?i of caringt of responsibility towards Itof man-ness in har
mony with it, harmonising it wherever possible to man himself at
hi* through man's own loving touch upon it. And there is not
<inly the cif the old Integrity, fighting for its life in
the work!, but there is the recognition of, and faith in the
lit that new world itself. There are the photo-
a the of new steely skyscrapers, illumined as
with holy by the sky-nrearing their heads over
i 4 2 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
the world below, helpless and passing In darkness, unless illumi
nated in turn by these symbols of fresh incarnations of light, which
must themselves be concrete manifestations of the very emerging
power and integrity they symbolize. The qualitative values of the
subject matter Stieglitz photographs are communicated without
any comment other than the sensitive registering or recreation of
the very values symbolized, in the prints themselves.
There was persistent a dream, too, that there could be a coming
together of those individuals who in their hearts must be seeking,
even i unconsciously, such a coming together* whereby their
ability to function as integrated human beings rather than as
maimed ones could be maintained. He Me that the same drive
which had led men to unite once must lead them 10 to unite again
-~a true e pluribus unum* * * *
He had the intuition, and he found to It In who
had aroused and m had corroborated the intuition, the
fundamental of to the underlying core
of living i in a growing by the wry wiy of life nf a
country actually on a principle of
"evtryman," was still militant in individual
in his wry as man, a yearning for that and only
dom> that only order, that he himself for: the to
function as a creative, throbbing being, true to of re*
sponsibility towards whatever one undertakes* And as Stleglitifft
photographs are a perfect recording! 10 his acts have
indicative of his faith in and love for the emergence of that
cst most dependable* must lonely individuality that is the of
cveryman* forging through the mid purgatory thai ii life,
wherever i nla light the light of fulfillment
with his own center that point beyond self; In
one into with nil lit the
the of ill Through the of this
self only* can one self and so free
10 It, In the of the and thus
alt with all
was tmt
ever that was tile a of that
AN AMERICAN PLACE 143
same fire that had led his heroes of the American Revolution, ill-
equipped, outnumbered, poor as they were, to attempt to create a
world wherein men might again function free o tyrannies, which,
for no qualitative reason, would but once again sacrifice the many
for the few. But the battle must necessarily be waged on new
terms the end must be even more clearly seen. . . .
To the ever recurring question, "Do you believe in Communism
for America?" Stieglitz's invariable reply is, "It isn't Communism
or any other *i$m* I'm thinking of. Show me a Communist or
any other 1st* who lives the spirit of what he believes he is preach
ing; who is prepared to bring to what he preaches the spirit of
what he believes himself to be saying; who is ready to die for the
thing he preaches and pledges his allegiance to, and I will follow
him to the ends of the earth. Short of creating one's own world
about one* wherever one is, in the spirit o what one preaches, one
cannot protest against the world as it exists. Unless one creates in
embryo what one wishes to see flower in full; unless whatever a
man does is a symbol o the thing he claims to be fighting for
then what he says and what he is fighting for in the end can have
no significance*" To wish for something without being that thing;
to warn something for nothing; not to be ready to die for whatever
one puts oac f i signature to; not to wish to be one's best self and to
free others to be their best selves, to do their best work; not to earn
the right to live; to wish to overthrow without having recreated in
the image of what one wills to be; to predict without already hav
ing experienced^ such allegiances are not for Stieglitz. Protest must
be affirmation first. The ism Is ol secondary importmice.
There is the desperate love of a parent now for those who in
their corroboration of one's own touch upon life are one's especial
children s of one 1 own blood* Every attack from without upon
beloved who arc life to one is like the potential death of a
child. "It Isn\ starving I'm thinking of, but of: seeing one's loved
and being unable to fcccl them/* One thinks of
of In The Black Mon{. A horse tethered
to tine of "surely," as he remarks, "by
? itMn/* rubs the o the tree In three places, Posetski
In dut "they have dirtied* spoiled, damaged, ruined
my orchard*' . . * It is lost, destroyed/ 1
I 4 4 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITO
"What," he asks, "will become of the garden when I die? * , , In the
condition you see it now, it will not exist for a single month without
me. The whole secret of its success is not because the garden is large
and there arc many labourers, but because I love the work you under
stand? I love it, perhaps more than my own self. Look at me- I do
everything myself, I work from morning to night, I do all the grafting
myself, I do all the pruning myself all the planting everything. When
I am assisted I am jealous and irritable to rudeness, The whole secret
lies in love, that is, in the vigilant master's eye, in the master's hand too,
in the feeling that when you go anywhere, to pay a visit of an hour, you
sit there and your heart is not estsy; you are not quite yountelf* you lire
afraid something may happen in the garden. When I die, who will look
after it all? Who will work? A gardener? Workmen? Ya? I tell you
my friend* the chief enemy in our business is not the hare, not the cock
chafer, not the frost, but the stranger**'
It is n perfect picture of Siicglitz. And what else is an American
Place than an of a poet, who like a Chekhov or aft Isaiah
stands In his own land hi* own other
a fin fie Iti yet within
himself more any other the *gd of a rebirth? There it the cry,
"They have ruined my orchard* 1 * and there i% too* that
municttble point beyond and within: lei the be
destroyed, if they have licit the proper apirit with which to
it on. The sect! is sturdy, li will arise again*
Biff, MKIS A fOtlNTfff TOO, wllti lt;* Jit Kwt jif f'fVllffl ;t Iff hf'ltfjtif, lilt
which he ha* a lifrumc *f cxjwiwtnu with hi*
faith, iftolatr* a living celt on which to ttfiitisttif *o runcm-
irate his on the human body f Amcriiii; n
ftimpiy a place in America: An ritii i
a celt IHII of tlif entire, bin *i a in tci
the cell and hy of tn the
lltii ju$t a* for the rell b i
i 4 cell* all of the
it of the in An be a
of aba lie MS a far ils
AN AMERICAN PLACE 145
and must have within it all potential apparatus for that proper
study.
As, in the words of Stieglitz, everything within An American
Place is tested by whether it functions as a necessary force for what
is outside, so everything that is within must stand the test o the
light of day; of the world beyond falling upon it from without.
There arc the large windows.
As An American Place must represent and be a tool for every-
man, so every man must be free to come to An American Place, not
only to be observed in the laboratory that must know him before it
can help him, but so that he too may observe, not only himself, but
the whole universe in concentrated form, in this same laboratory,
which to help him must first show him to himself: as part of the
whole to arise through him. There is the door open to all , . .
There arc the photographs, not of: celebrities, of special men in the
worldly sense., but of the inner light of any man: of the elevator
boy, the simple country folk of a passing era, the gentle city folk;
of the essence of that which, in moving one, is worth fighting for.
Such moving beauty, if one can but open one's eyes to see it, exists
in cveryrtuinj and in proportion as he is given the opportunity to
show it will it flower* There is no pandering to cliches of wealth
or worker, but a losing of sel to work and to the fertile spirit,
wherever. There In true caring, which is act. There is the democ
racy of taking any space, whether a garret or a loft in aa office
but kling and through respect for one's materials and concentration
upon the actual problem involved, without theory^ transforming the
materials of the place into a veritable shrine, with the cor-
roboratioft of StiegUtzfr vision o America upon the very walls.
Better to hive a prophet create a into a shrine than a shrine
without a prophet a mere place*
But us that which is within must stand ia readiness for all
who would so those who enter must decide for themselves i
Is within is to them, and In accordance with that
is the challenge o the Place: how to protect that
which in for all, the fate of its very existence
rent* in the of who need it When for years StieglitB
did not lock the of that precursor o An American Place, 291,
it was not merely the idea of locking things was one foreign
146 AMERICA AND ALFRED STtEGLITZ
to his nature, or because energy expended upon keys was energy
taken from more vital activity, but because of something even
more important that was again at stake* As the Place is ever on
trial, so the people themselves who enter and need are on trial as to
whether they are able to preserve for themselves that which they
claim to care for and to need. But this they must recognize for
themselves* It cannot be told "Automatically, if anything is stolen,
the people will have forfeited their right to that which exists for
them if they but know how to guard it, * - . I cannot conceive of
art as property, or as other than belonging to the people, but until
the people protect what is theirs, they will deny themselves of the
very thing they seem to hunger for, and this of art being
turned into property will continue. . , I do not feel that I can
call a thing 4 mine,* unless it is available for all 1 *
That there are locks at An American Place is a symbol not only
of the changing of the value put upon the work
he guards, by the very world from which he must protect it* but
of the misunderstanding that is bound to Stiegiitr/t own
attitude towards the whole involved. For he re-
to regard as property the work over which he it guardian*
Yet, la order to protect the makers of it he has to
forego Ws own inner to let the whit i*
thelrtthe very of trust. This Is a hurt to him*
and we can understand Stlegita only if we understand the nature
of the paradox, that although the doors are to till by day, ai
night they are locked, (even though Sticgliut ready to
the Place to any who it, at whatever the hour). Only thus can
we understand the deep hurt engendered within him, born cif the
very love that he must betray in order to serve it.
He has said hciw If ycm believe in a thing sufficiently, it In
the world* belicft one's it* Tftti may
be a point. It is that part of it, cor*
and belief that its the of
life, than any of
it, w a whole, may t that Si part: of the
But arc of tie
ill a him. There *tre
**lt is Ufa be ha fl l lite in a a river. The
AN AMERICAN PLACE M7
house is of wood and not very solidly built. Each year the river
overflows, even though to no very great extent. Somehow I feel
that some day it will overflow more violently and our house will be
submerged. I warn the others in the house that we must rebuild it
with strong, deep, steel foundations, so that we shall be prepared.
They say that the other houses are of wood; that the river has never
come near us; that there is no reason to expect that it will; that they
have their work to do. One day the river overflows as it has never
overflowed before, and the house is flooded. Everyone is wildly
excited and afraid and calls out to rush to the top of the house. I
stand on the ground floor, and continue with what I am doing.
They call desperately to me to come quickly to where it is safe. I
refuse. I say that I shall remain where I am. There is no other choice
for me as 1 sec life.**
To sec and to see even beyond the point of seeing. It is the revela
tion, o this point beyond that illuminates his photographs, as it is in
the quality of the light that it takes so long to fathom at the Place.
"Everywhere in life there is a common desire for something that
seems to be brought to life when two forces potentially meet,
achieving a Yes to a Yes, but even when that point is seemingly
achieved, there Is the straining for the point even beyond." The
Place is the touching of the point beyond touch, what StiegHtz
calls a relationship more intimate than between any two persons,
for what in art does not change, and there is no earthly limitation,
no third or personally disturbing element that can come between
oneself and one's experience of this kind* The Place is the point
of contact between those who are seeking and those who have
found. "When 1 am permitted to give what is mine to give; when
1 sec someone simply* openly communicate what he is getting at
Ac putting it Into form in Ms own life and for the benefit of
the one who has given him that something, then that is my pay for
what I urn doing. 11
Ai with a camera* light m used by which to $ce and as the active
in the very process upon which photography depends. That
which Ii beyond man: the question what is life, is left iu darkness,
while out of with life* out of essential living, comes light
Dark room, light room, StiegHtz is ever the photographer,
far below the outer surface of appearance, showing to each
AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEOLH7,
his essential self, writing his signature within his work and not
possessively upon it. u Whcn I was young, far a time I would sign
my name to my photographs, but soon I felt thai if my work dicl
not carry its own signature within it, then the easiest thing to
forge would be a signature, 11
There is the problem of how to show color to the eotor-blmd, play
music to the deaf. There arc the two opposing forces driving cine.
There is the voice saying that if cannot be achieved There is the
other voice, stronger, active* ever aemiti/ing new surfaee* upon
which one 1 * message may be written, In pro{xtrtion to the intensity
of one's vision ami one's necessity to communicate that vision fchall
one's power to scmici/e surfaces never before written upon by
man, to probe beneath surfaces never realiatc! by nun. It is
the key to his preoccupation with pioneer work with the foster
ing of pioneer work* as of the patient of with
who noc yet "aeen," not yet "heard," And In hi* own
with the world, i* the and the dturovcry of
art a Frcticl, a $w be gne the of
and flic ti the
symbol* the the test cif An American I%i:r
of one who* ills
the of the Mace-- which i* the welfare of .til
i to the
petty deiicincics of those involved* attention* m hr
MO, from the important work at hand* wtikti is the? of the
ship and of the of thosr aboaid. In the cud the
friend will have t-aiwd all aUtit iw tSruwit "And ynu will
drown with the rr," thr $1 inaiir. **Ili!l at
I will have* wii*n i* kifftctitifg***
TII icr, Ever to icr tnoit iv He
hiii all 1*11 Ur if KI 4
heart. . , What he lr . , Truly thisi t*
tlte iif *i tif . it! T0 to
anil to the of hi* itml ci^
i* tine *rf hi* lie bn
$* jwii nf tt a* 1 set if, lie
ii r ftii/* w *l*n *r the tif any and
it to u* ilr ni 11 iraf tif kit, ihe
AN AMERICAN PLACE 149
face of the universe. When will the people learn to husband what
is theirs and keep it intact, thus only having it? . . ." "If I cannot
go to the Louvre, the Louvre does not come to me . . ." Or again,
he chides his America: "If the American had his way, he would
put his Niagara Falls and his lakes and his trees and his rivers into
Ford cars and show them the world. . . ."
There are certain things he particularly demands from himself:
ever to have more strength; to leave no edges ragged; to follow
through what he has begun. . . . "To have the physical strength
of a scale that can weigh a thousand tons of coal, plus a psychic
sensitivity equal to the sensitivity of the scale that can weigh a ray
of light."
There is always that something ever beyond one.
Again the prophet stands at the window looking out upon the
world. You will hear him say that it is not art he cares about sav
ing, for If all of the art in the world were to disappear and some
thing out there were to be bom in a pure spirit, that would con
centrate a little upon some "common decency" instead of so much
upon what is called "common sense," then art would inevitably
flower again. No, it isn't this that interests him. It isn't "art" and
"literature* 1 that: preoccupy him ? but that which moves one and
becomes art and literature in time. It is not the spasmodic burst of
activity based on "ideas,** but: the sustained growth and the devo
tion to a dominating force, upon which one's very life depends,
that moves him, - . * The eyes reach far, gazing into the point
where all points meet photographic, antiphotographic, surface,
below the surface, personal, impersonal He looks out upon
America. The door is open to all, as if for the door to be closed
to were to shut out light; as if to shut out light were to
shut out vision, were to shut out life itself. . . .
As In a laboratory, to sec is the end; no solution, no slogans are
nought. Butt ii in a scientific laboratory, where no practical or mate
rial 'end is sought* what is found is ultimately applied to the physi
cal of man, so in a laboratory such as An American Place,
what it found is In the end applied by man for his own spiritual
As the 'form of a Gothic cathedral is a symbol of its reaching
the and includes in the magic o its very being the
i 5 o AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
point it aspires to touch, so the clean, sharply defined cubes that
are the parts of An American Place, enclosed as they arc, save for
the windows opening upon the city beyond and the door leading
out into the office building itself, are in simple and forthright
manner a symbol of a holding the Kingdom of Heaven within*
Fully to be; to sec; to let exist what is; to nurture: of such is the
containment and life-giving force that is the calm and all-inclusive-
ness of the square, light-filled rooms that arc An American Place*
The reaching towards what is beyond anything one can see with
the outer eye* if it cannot be achieved wherever one is, cannot be
achieved anywhere. If one cannot take materials available tci all
and use them in such it manner a$ to transform them Into some
thing beyond themselves* then surely one's use of more precious
materials must be mcaning!e$ft"4icpcnding upon external
qualities not created out of one'* own being. "I am here, 11 Stieg*
lit? "Whether they come or whether they do not come: I am here.**
It is that simple, m Sticglitx tells it. * * *
To ask Stieglir/* how to "ittlvatbn" is to be told twiftly,
mirdy, "You cati cte only you i You do
a* you are doing* The of not atk it It
to do, but upon its way: ;i bktlc of For who
would who would u*e for
solving their problem* Stieglita hat little enccmragernem to offer.
Another law of the interplay of forces: **If you try to
one frcjni some inevitability, you will a situation
the one from which you arc attempting to protcctt" He is no
evangelist forth, promising an tithcrworldlinoui not
able on this earth* His is the rctcfttlcMitess of the
ing forth; of the Greek and df the
<rf p;irib!rfr**witltiiiii life to
with ear to hear. Ik It by
ing it m u> call If in trst truth v
trtith that tie hai
, . . He h no
one eye oft Fate.* 1 Hii clue it not
* ti by the
*Thcape arc two
fiae go to i and they Ttitif
AN AMERICAN PLACE 151
houses are equally well built; their situations on the hillside are
equally advantageous; their work equally well done. One day there
is a storm which destroys the farm of one of them, leaving the
farm of the other standing intact. That is my understanding of the
word justice," Another man comes with a tale, "A terrible thing
has happened. A friend of mine has betrayed me, even knowing
that I am financially ruined. He has ruined others as well. How
can men^do such horrible things to one another? I do not under
stand.** Stieglitz, quietly withdrawn, replies, "God, too, does ter
rible things to men, you know."
He speaks his message: always a variation on his theme, which
like Lohengrin departs once you ask its name; which cannot be
told any more than one may say what life itself is. For he has
faith that there are those who will hear, and that through the hear
ing there may be an opening up of closed worlds. His message is
not a promise to create worlds where none have stood before, tak
ing unto himself tasks beyond the scope of man; worlds which
must crumble, but rather: " . to let one another flower, and
through what each takes from the other, the soil shall reenforce
Itself/* There is the challenge to communicate out of darkness into
light, as a seed flowers imcler the warming touch of the sun, . . .
But always there is the knowledge of the point beyond seeing,
beyond action, beyond communication: the symbol of life, mys
terious, absolute: the first and the last cause* Out of the infinite into
the infinite. * . *
Stiegltar* stands looking at the point where all points meet; "I
will be sitting with the plate of a picture I have just taken in my
handf . It will be the picture I have always known that some day
1 would be able to take* It will be the perfect photograph, embody
ing all that I have ever wished to say* I will just have developed it;
just have looked at it; just have seen that it was exactly what I
wanted. The room will be empty, quiet* The walls will be bare
clean. I will tit looking at the picture* It will slip from my hands,
and break as It Mil to the ground. I will be dead* They will come-
No one will ever have seen the picture nor know what it was.
That, for mC| 1$ my story of perfection. 11
DOROTHY NORMAN.
PART TWO
VII. POST-IMPRESSIONISM
THE EMERGENCE OF MODERN ART from a distinguished but somber
nineteenth-century parentage was as essentially spectacular
and unpredictable as the appearing o electricity in a world long
accustomed to a less incandescent illumination. As manifestations
of the same spiritual impulsion, these kindred phenomena were
definitely part and parcel of the new progression that has been
ousting from the social scene these past threescore years one phase
after another of established ritual and routine. This evocation of a
new era, with its harnessing of strange powers and gathering o
fresh impetus, with its steady but inevitable insistence on new align
ments and its unforeseen adjustments^ undoubtedly characterizes the
boldest, most vital and intensive assault on the human probabilities
yet recorded; and It is hardly surprising that art, perhaps the most
sensitive of our scismographic agencies, has from the first felt and
recorded each cosmic thrust o this long progression with clair
voyant accuracy. Such liberation o latent forces, bringing into ex
perience a mounting manifestation of light and power ia swiftly
increasing intensities, has led us to penetrate beyond the accepted
outlines of a hitherto static and cloistered world toward horizons
$o boundless that we can but watch and wait in growing wonder
at the unfolding panorama, Even those pioneering souls instru
mental in shaping the first luminous statements of the new creed
could hardly have guessed what exciting chapters lay ready for
the turning of the page. Edison, sufficiently sensitized to capture
the first faint but revolutionary rays o the rising electrical
effulgence, made the year 1879 outstanding by setting the first
electric bulb glowing in his Menlo Park laboratory. In much the
way but less dramatically, Monet started a new cycle when,
156 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGL1TZ
stimulated by tKe splendor of the Turners at the National Gallery
back IE 1870, lie began to develop the possibilities o transposing
the play of direct sunlight to canvas.
From the very beginning, this electrically conditioned epoch
has been fraught with untold potentialities. In America a pro
nounced metaphysical awakening, following hard upon the coun
try's stand against human slavery, was set in motion; at the same
time, a like stirring was noticeable in caste-ridden India toward new
social attitudes. But however one may interpret this concerted
approach toward a more emancipated basis of thought and action*
the increase has definitely been along the line ol light, metaphysi
cally as welt as physically; and any record of modern art tit all
cognisant of cause and effect must give that English landscstpist,
J* M. W. Turner, special credit for having the first pictorially
to brave the sun and hear away a coherent of it* radiance.
His habitual concern for the logical ordering of phenomena
be it tree or ruck or dbud or wive-wts an part cif his
raptly vision which to Mi work t vitalising
of that km in with the
oi nature that the m. With
out sort of introduction to Turner 1 ! rare mid
of the laws of natural as in His
voluminous Modern 10 anyone to
take the plunge, it is quite to this inn-
portant of his art, although many of hit waiter and
most of his splendidly conceived and M J4Uer Sttidiorum"
plates would seem to an easy clue* It t* little then,
that the Turners which In thr
kry for the first lime sufficiently to him till
on a new tangent, to him into a and
ciC which was it) into a ttf
the trf lie new wan well it
did not fake and his long f
tare itic the cif
into the and til the
of wai
on a xeal and ut
POST-IMPRESSIONISM 157
the jaboratory than the studio. A fine period of sunny incubation
set in for those artists attuned to this new order of painting, where
form per se became submerged in the general illumination and
iridescence of the whole scene, A healthy individualism arose, with
each man free to wander where he would in this newly achieved
outdoors^The romantic revolution in French art that reached its
climax prior to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War had pre
pared the way for this sudden adoption of the plein-air latitudes of
Impressionism: with the traditional hold of Church, State, and the
academies in abeyance, it was every man for himself, and the sky
definitely the limit. The devotees of this new form of painting
basked luxuriously in their new-found freedom, and it was a richly
preparatory period for the strange and unconventional findings that
were so soon to crowd upon the scene. Technically, this loosening
of traditional procedure lent a greater pliability to painting thaa
had been known before and paved the way for the startling inno
vations that were to be released with the rending of the Impres
sionistic veils. Representation for its own sake having reached a
stage of superlative refinement at the hands of the classic and
romantic masters o the nineteenth century, the soft and languorous
envelope that Monet and his associates drew across the face of
nature lulled to a great extent the long ingrained and decidedly
overworked instinct for close depiction of natural objects. Further
more, a new agent had appeared in the shape of the camera to take
over tilt responsibility o supplying a facsimile record of the human
leaving art freer than ever before for plumbing the more
Intangible problems of painting*
With the Aickening of the Impressionistic mists and vapors, new
dynamics* soon to drop like sharply revealing lightnings, were
steadily A breaking-tip of old-time considerations of
technique* a brand-new layout in prismatics, a complex weaving of
brttfih that merely approximated form these innovations in
painting had wrought sufficient consternation in the camp o the
cofttarawei ; but due general reaction to Impressionistic dicta was
ai nothing compared to the storm that broke loose in Paris with
the first realization of what the new pictorial formulae bearing
authentication implied, The transitional steps leading
the light-hearted, gently ruminative modulation o tone and
IS8 AMERICA AND ALFRED ST1EGLITZ
manipulation of accent of the plein-air painters to the highly
charged and incisive handling of the Master o Aix are not easy to
detect, for C&annc himself had little or nothing in common with
the practices and preferences of Monet and his friends, although he
was to inherit something ol the general lightness of brushwork that
came in with Impressionism, Excessive concentration on volume and
flow o form was apparent from the first in Cezanne's painting* as
is clearly set forth in his Man in a Blue Cap in the Bliss Collection,
a study made prior to Monet's historic visit to the National Gallery-
This advance from the tonal pleasantries and sunny platitudes of
Monet to the searching, scaring invention* o Centime would
seem to parallel the course o event* in the field of electrical phe
nomena where the early manifestation* o light and power were
slowly but surely superseded by an increasingly significant and
determined control of thin all-transforming element. Ami m the
luminoui of the inevitably
into the dynamic of the
In we a of pictorial fervor and effulgence
that definitely the of art from
the newly that hai to be
crnistn, and we may well look upon him a* the Great Divide of
painting. No om mm hm ever such a spell da art
as this timple*mincieti but marvdbwly informed and informing
artist* Even today It it unlikely that we fully the
significance of his epochal career, but at leant if can IK
assumed thai there can be no hack to a In
painting any more than there can be a return to a
ciitioneti by electricity, It w* a rtwifcr rf fortunefor tifi at
he was circunmamisiily itwt away from the Paris of his
time and its doubtful tttivjnMgc*. a llic
of the day* thrown utterly his own tie wa
10 figttt out hii wiili mi
his of His Alti to for
him the ami of flte wa
itig to him In hii
were no or in
tic til hi* life He wai lif
fate in the Icitii ami cif lilt
POST-IMPRESSIONISM 159
painting career just how far it was possible basically to revalue
form and color, just how far the singing quality of a pictorial state
ment could be advanced. The art world of our own time, respon
sive to the throb and beat of Cezanne's inspired orchestration of
effect as to no other single influence, has readily profited by this
realignment of pictorial forces, the essential idea of which Clive
Bell has so happily summarized in his phrase "significant form."
There has appeared recently a critical analysis of modem art that
is likely to stand for a long while to come as the most illuminating
commentary on the complexities o this much discussed and, in
many quarters, little understood phenomenon. I refer to Herbert
Read's Art Now: An Introduction to the Theory of Modern Paint-
ing and Sculpture, a volume worthy of study by all students of
twentieth-century art* While the author deliberately excludes from
his survey of the astounding diversities o contemporary art any
attempt to establish "a causal chain in this uniform aspect of con
fusion," he has nevertheless set down with remarkable lucidity and
sympathy the general nature and the essential factors underlying
the seemingly "catastrophic character" o this revolutionary period.
He graphically sketches the emergence of the "Symbolist" attitude
of the Post-Impressionist, so aptly summed up in Cezanne's dictum:
**I have not tried to reproduce nature: I have represented it," an
attitude wholly at variance with either the ''scientific 1 ' or the
"empirical" methods of the European schools of the previous five
centuries* In Art Now* tibia alMmportant Symbolist credo is given
a thorough and exhaustive airing* This radical departure from
facsimile painting, so signally embodied in the work of Cezanne
and to a degree in the painting of Gauguin and Van 'Gogh,
not only opened the way for every sort of pictorial inventiveness
tad experimentation, but brought European art for the first time
Into direct alignment with the principles of ancient Chinese paint
ing its Insistence on metaphysical content Such a sudden shift
from the time-Eonored objective standpoint in art to a subjective
of reasoning, where ultimate satisfaction inevitably rests in
symbols, is perhaps responsible for the meretricious aspect of much
modern work. Confounding liberty with license has resulted in a
of ill-considered and soon4o-be-forgotten productions* But
in the main the beginning of a genuine rapprochement between
i6o AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
the art processes of the East and the West can be discerned, How
ever dimly*
In his desire to "get away from the exact mechanical reproduc
tion of that imaginary mirror-like level onto which, in the act of
vision, we conventionally project things/* Read points out how
Clzannc was continually projecting **a metaphysical conception of
painting; a notion that there existed in the sense-data of the painter
a Veal' vision independent of the intellect and beyond, at the back
of, the emotions/* To quote further;
But C&anne was n simple man* though a jiawionittc one: and he had
no 8ru#icr to formulate a system on the baits of hfa passionate prsic*
tice* his clogged insight* His method was* in a sense, still empirical. Ik
kept to his ideal of the "real" vision, but he to arrive 1 at the
representation of this viiion by tentative meant* He explored the struc
ture and the colours of an object, tirdkssly, with maddening
persistence* until he felt that the and on hit canvas
did in fact hit "real" vision* It a method chat required the
of a saint, tnd are very rare (even artixts)
It wo* mot a method likely to popular*
c> the intensity of his feeling fur form ant! cdbr* Cf/annc
wits able to subjectify the objective material, no that his mrmt
prosaic *tiU*tic composition monum^nutl, imitviduah He
lublimtitcd incidentai part o the pictorial whole* giving to the
finished palming an endtiring vitality that ciiiihlrs iie m rcuint to
it again and for delight* Such cottcrptiotn itinrr
than the paint rr scon at a given morncm* for they iit the
prcKTs^ cif suhjcctiiicatipn an uliiciluie idrntity erf their c>wn t a Sw
ing forci* a presence that greatly cmliimt. Ilii^ mm <f puinting is
far removed from the mirnif-likf of the Mi<*illcil *Vicn*
ttfk 11 painter who uses itny in his "ntucly* 1 as like
in up t for
thit "Cktd 1 ! In Hii ilfs well the world," In
thii of the the who
rtfas may pin a of liii own pin of
ii Hur he is urn to
lor the of the seta out to a of
an individuality of own
POST-IMPRESSIONISM 161
from what are commonly known as personal likes or dislikes
beauty, as Whistler pointed out, being ever present to the trained
eye, whether in the rose or the dunghill The true modernist thus
begins to draw upon the inexhaustible funds of truth and beauty
that lie outside a purely personal sense of form and color and line.
Such art is born of a kind of divine impulsion, whereby the
ordinary rules and regulations do not apply. At such times techni
cal inventions and necessities are suddenly established, to the con
fusion of the uninitiated. In painting of this order and the myriad
pale imitations of Cezanne's style only prove how universally he
was endowed a new manifestation of pictorial power is brought to
light, conjuring up some fresh phase of absolute beauty from out
that illimitable storehouse of abstract form and color that Plato
indicates so lucidly in his Philebm when he says:
I do not now intend by beauty of shapes what most people would ex
pect, such as that of living creatures or pictures, but, for the purpose of
my argument, I mean straight lines and curves and squares, if you
understand me. For I mean that these things are not beautiful relatively,
like other things, but always and naturally and absolutely; and they have
their proper pleasures, no way depending on the itch of desire. And I
mean colours of the same beauty and pleasures.
Surely, this is as cogent and conclusive a statement concerning
Cezanne's break with the traditional handling of form and color
as could be framed. Here is form established for its own sake, not
dependent on any other consideration or relationship, application or
purpose form that is beautiful "always and naturally and abso
lutely.*' Cezanne, in his avowed attempt "to make out of Impres
sionism something soEd and enduring as the art of the museums,"
was actuated by no clear-cut Platonic theory, but, as Read points
out, he staked everything on the "inherent form" in contradistinc
tion to the impression of natural vivacity that had actuated the
schools of painting "from Constable to Manet." This accounts for
his abiding passion for "planes, volumes, and outlines, which tended
to give his paintings a geometrical organization." But, as if this
was not enough, he added to his concern with "the cylinder, the
sphere, and the cone** the further attribute of color, a condition that
in his eyes gave to form its ultimate force and distinction. "When
xfe AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
colour has its richness, form has its plenitude." Here, in C&anne's
own words, is set forth the whole story of his art.
In order to achieve this dazzling display of imponderable form
and rich color without depending on the involved processes of the
older masters in underpainting and glazing, Cezanne was obliged
to arrive at a technical mastery that necessitated a surpassingly
flexible touch and rhythmic flow of form that is perhaps only to be
matched in the work of the great Chinese painters. He undoubtedly
possessed the most sensitive touch in all Occidental art, a touch
that is, mirabile dictu, equally alive and varied in the ponderable
oils as in the lighter medium of water color. Of course, his earlier
paintings are more loaded than his later work, but the same mar
velous sense of swelling, salient form is there throughout. It is this
instant, directly contrived rendering of form that gives his least
effort an inescapable thrust of pattern and plane* No one ever
produced such solidity in paint with as little technical manipula
tion. The Venetian wizards and certain other masters, notably
Rembrandt and Velasquez, accomplished astounding feats of pig
mentation by means of intricate and long sustained processes of
underpainting and glazing. They built up their lights scientifically,
often repeating the preliminary stages o modeling as many as
twenty times, contrasting heavily loaded passages with trans
parent glazes to such a degree that enlarged photographic studies
of certain sections of their work appear more like sculpture than
painting. They achieved the effect of powerful form in this in
direct way without actually having fully to master the problems
involved. What Cezanne perceived and recorded almost at a glance,
they arrived at circuitously, creating remarkably deceptive sem
blances of swelling form but minus its dynamic content They
reasoned out their effects through the well-tested processes of the
schools; he attained his goal through sudden realization and sharp
necessity. Cezanne knew instinctively the true balance of forces in
nature the intimate and exciting relation between the angle and
the arc, the power of softly focused strokes massed against razor-
like slash of final accent, the sudden compression of pictorial Interest
like crossroads meeting on a map, the sly and subtle use of elision,
the necessity for points of rest, the dynamic insistence of duitering
lines drawn into some centrifugally managed whirl^ the dramatic
POST-IMPRESSIONISM 163
value of sudden pauses or blanks cutting in on the general drift of
the pattern. His calligraphic touch remained the same in all his
work, and he could shift from oil to water color without loss of
tempo or delicacy. Not only does his marvelous brushwork keep
his painting alive, but the supremely important faculty of con
stantly transcending the visual facts of the case was also his.
Examined from a purely anatomical point of view, his large Male
Figure, which is undoubtedly the clou of the Bliss Cezannes, dis
closes enough peculiarities of form to send the academically-minded
to the madhouse; and yet I doubt if there is a more significant
example of Post-Impressionist painting to be found. From the
purely realistic angle, the whole work appears most unnatural, even
suggestive of the novice in art; arbitrarily managed outlines cut in
upon the fleshly parts of the figure in a most alarming way, and in
certain cases accents have been introduced into the anatomical
structure that might seem more appropriate to a textile pattern.
And yet it is one of his most exciting, most satisfying pieces of
representation, sustained throughout by the intensity of his vision,
bringing into focus all the bright and glowing facets of his pic
torial sensibilities through that "maddening persistence" which en
abled him to arrive at his "real'* vision.
Here, then, is the central genius of the Post-Impressionist group,
whose shift of balance from the objective to the subjective set in
motion a reversal of form in all departments of twentieth-century
art. There were o course those two other luminaries, Gauguin
and Van Gogh, who, in their individual ways, manifested much the
same sort o pictorial intensity as Cezanne, With Gauguin it was
mainly mood and color that caught the new intensities, particu
larly In the final Polynesian period, when his natural feeling for
rich hues and cabalistic design burst into sultry flame, adding a
new and provocative note to the symbolic attitude toward nature
that was being so rapidly formulated by these later painters. Van
Gogh, too, broke into violent reaction against the prevailing serenity
of the Impressionists, reconditioning their timid strokings and
tenderly planted color vibrations to such a degree that he practi
cally burned himself out in the process. He went about as far as
the law allows In the direction of fiery manipulation of pigment
and boldness of accent, setting a pace that no other painter could
164 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
follow. Although less turbulent by nature than Gauguin and Vat*
Gogh, Seurat brought to this Post-Impressionist group a similar
sensibility for heightened power of effect that characterizes the best
work of this special period. He also took the Impressionistic tech
nique to further conclusion, giving it a more complex and for
malized treatment that in due time resulted in Pointillism. He, like
Van Gogh, came to a point where he could advance his technique
no farther, his ultimate rendering of the Impressionist formulas
resulting in lovely sensitive patterns never to be surpassed in this
special field of painting. Like Gauguin with his flaming evocations
of the South Seas, like the tempestuous Van Gogh in his dizzy,
impassioned assault on nature, Seurat, too, produced painting that
was distinctly climactic. Something of Cezanne's ultimatum is to be
felt in the work of these three so dissimilar artists, whose combined
influence was to lead on into even more diversified modes of paint
ing. But while the work of Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat served
primarily to heighten the general feeling for greater individualism
in art, (as soon came to pass with the Fauves,) C6z;anne's particular
conception of form and color founded a royal dynasty that was to
spread out and embrace all nations. The work of the other three
left little room for further elaboration or even emulation, so strangely
individual was each in his own estate; but what Cezanne had
broached in his tireless experimentation along the lines of pictorial
organization and abstract beauty directly prepared the way for the
geometrical innovations of Cubism.
The time was ripe, by the turn of the century, for the first direct
steps toward a wholly abstract art. A growing sense of the machine
with its increasingly complex scheme of living was leading to some
sort of climax that would terminate the outmoded methods of the
nineteenth century. Each mechanical advance was a direct call for
a further supply of electrical power. On the esthetic side, Cezanne's
feeling for "formal structure" found a true affiliation with, this
mechanistic trend of thought, and the modernistic melange was
further augmented by a sudden interest in primitive and savage
arts, El Greco, after a comfortable repose of several centuries* was
sympathetically resurrected as the foster parent of the whole move
ment. The Fames, with Matisse at their head, were frantically ex
perimenting in all matmer of new pictorial schemes,
POST-IMPRESSIONISM 165
Braque, Rouault, Dufy, Vlaminck, and the rest outdid each other
in self-determined distortion of form and in willfully "unnatural"
color harmonies, and Paris rang with their passionate protests at
the conventions. But more significant yet was the appearance of
Cubism in 1908. Here was the Cezanne credo of form for its own
sake taken to a logical conclusion. Picasso, together with Braque,
became the leading protagonist in this new phase of the modern
spirit While the Fauves were instrumental in carrying on the emo
tional and symbolistic tradition of Gauguin and Van Gogh, it was
mainly the efforts of Picasso, owing to his special aptitude for
abstract form, that evolved this wholly subjective, mechanistic
ordering of area and line. The zero hour had indeed struck, as far
as facsimile painting was concerned. From that point on, the story
of art was to be built up out of new elements, was to flow in many
and diverse streams, toward undreamed-of objectives. The existing
order of things pictorial was being plumbed with a vengeance.
In those transitional days Matisse was a lively, dominating figure,
trying out each new scheme on his palette in true opportunist
fashion, cleverly combining the best of each and ultimately arriving
at a highly calligraphic and personal style that has become one of
the dominant characteristics of modern painting and that assures
him an important place in the historical progression stemming from
Cezanne. Brightness of color, breeziness of style, an all-over check
erboard patterning that hails in part from Persian art, a fine sim
plification of chiaroscuro, a charming na*ivet6 and instantaneousness
of vision, a vision that Read defines as "primarily integral," as "pre-
logical" and the "delight of the innocent eye" all these essentially
"modern" qualities became in time part of the Matisse equipment
and helped to round out a talent that has produced perhaps the
most exhilarating stilUife painting that has ever been seen. So com
pletely is Matisse the perfect embodiment of the still-life painter in
the broadest sense of the word that his figures seldom emerge out
side the general diapering of his canvases. Matisse is wholly within
the limits of his period, intellectually straightforward, an outstand
ing example of the modern artist who has made a success of his
art and an art of his success. His few excursions into the unseen or
the semi-abstract have not been altogether happy, and his best work
has been done as the Fttuve fever has given way to a more mature,
!66 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
prosaic interpretation o the natural scene. Braque, like Matisse,
has remained quite within the French tradition, and although he
worked side by side with Picasso in establishing the Cubist cult, he
has hardly ever exceeded that initial proclamation of pictorial free
dom, save to elaborate constantly his original formulae. His latest
compositions, such as Paul Rosenberg brought this past season to
New York, are the acme of a most distinguished talent, but they
are still securely linked to his first Cubist utterances by a sublime
contentment with the creed that he and Picasso so signally set forth
in 1908. His pictorial inventions have grown constantly richer with
the years; innately French, they curiously recapture the Louis
Quinze feeling for squat and formal elegance.
With the bursting open of the power plants of the world in
1914, when with frightful suddenness the sense of power as power
could no longer be humanly sustained, a new directional influence
was found actuating the general scheme of affairs. A period of
power-put-to-use sets in, a period of penetration, with earth and sea
and sky and time and space as new and more enticing targets to aim
at Penetration goes forward in the perfection of the radio; in im
proved forms of communication; in the rapid conquest of the air;
in stratospheric and bathyspheric experiments; in the evolution of
more resilient metals; in new conditioning of light and in ever
more dire explosives; in increasingly powerful telescopic ranges; in
television; in the new photography that pierces solid matter and
fog; in the creation of the cinema, an art form for the many and
not the few, and the first attempt to link together three such
dissimilar elements as science, art, and commerce, without any one
of which the cinema as we know it in its broadest sense today
would cease to function, to mention some of the outstanding
marvels of the electrical pageant that our century has seen come to
pass, a picture certainly that for sheer audacity and swift seizure
of fresh opportunity through skill and daring has had no counter
part in history.
And what is the counter record of this period of penetration ia
the course of contemporary art? One has only to glance through
the pages of Art Now with its dizzy assortment of moderaly
ttiodcd pictures to see just how far the penetrative spirit of the
dky has been reflected 1 in our thinking, to realisse what straftge
POSTJMPRESSIONISM 167
weird and wonderful inventions in art have come to pass since the
Great War shattered the complacency o this particular planet. And
of the generous company of artists who have found this post Cubist
period to their taste, Picasso has come to be the one name to con
jure with. Standing head and shoulders above his fellow workers,
this spirited, shock-trooping Basque has kept Paris the focal center
of artistic thought and development ever since he got into his
stride in 1908. He has taken the so-called School of Paris out of its
traditionally French envelope and stamped it with an authority that
is responsible alone to some extra-territorial impulsion difficult at
the moment to determine. The prophetic note that Eugenio d'Ors
sounds in his illuminating monograph on Picasso is probably as
near to the facts as we can come just now:
The nineteenth century was dying when Picasso was in his ado
lescence. . . . But even at his very beginnings, in those inevitable
moments of pristine babblings, when the spirit is bursting to speak; even
before he left Barcelona ... he produced precocious works so out of
keeping with the Impressionist atmosphere which then dominated artistic
circles, so precociously foreshadowing artistic tendencies toward construc
tion and the neo-cla$sicism, that they may almost be said to seem later
than the Picasso of 1912 or even the Picasso of 1928. He who looks at
them marvels, and would be moved to speak of miracles or of fraud
if he were not persuaded as I am that in the vocation of men there is a
force more intelligent and unifying than the consciousness of men itself:
a force which, far from presenting the cosmic dispersion of the uncon
scious offers a superconscious coherence which we can only call angdic
witness the guardian angel of Tobias or the familiar ^daemon of
Socrates,
Just as Cfeanne epitomized the Post-Impressionist period, so
Picasso is the special embodiment of the next great division of the
pictorial progression that we call, for want of a better term, modern
art. What seemed in the eaily days of Picasso's painting to be
merely a peculiar restlessness, a vagrant and unsettled will, an un-
equaled precocity, we can accept today as a direct response to the
underlying tidal flow of human aspiration toward a more emanci
pated, more buoyant state of being* Darting here and there, boldly
appropriating a hint from this painter or that, seldom stopping
168 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
more than to define the nature of each fresh invention, despising in
his highly sensitized and overcrowded mind the delights o surface
painting, digging feverishly into each fresh vein of thought, some
times achieving a comic gesture of salutation to the gaping throng,
sometimes mocking directly a special style or fashion in art, but
making each new premise a logical step in his own evolution,
Picasso has delivered the coup de grdce to pedestrian art. Despite
the various group tendencies of the Ecole de Paris, he greatly
dominates the situation today and doubtless will until he signs his
last canvas. Only this past year has he taken stock of the surrealists
in a series of amazingly brilliant and daring water colors, matching
them stroke for stroke on their own grounds.
Without wishing to alarm unduly, I feel certain that the art of
the next few decades stands in grave danger of being further than
ever removed from the realm of the predictable. Paris, highly
feminized, centralized, wiU doubtless continue to be the main
locale for the operations of the modern school, will doubtless con
tinue to exert her prior claims as focal point for Occidental art until,
in the course of slow time, some other center sends up a more
potent call to pictorial arms. Where dse than in Paris could the
Impressionists have found a more fitting cradling for their newly
conceived adventure? Who other than a Parisian would have had
the instinct to discover what lay concealed in the work of Cezanne?
Or what other metropolitan kaleidoscope could have supplied the
requisite elements for the shaping of a talent like that of Matisse?
In what other capital than Paris could Picasso have found a public
sufficiently alert and ministering to sustain him and his art and to
keep them both in proper circulation? For unlike Cezanne, he has
needed the applause of the crowd, the gentle flattery of a de luxe
press, and an emotionally constituted critical fraternity to broadcast
his least utterance. The stamp of Paris is still supreme, no matter
whether the outside world relishes it or not By constantly radiating
her supercharged reactions to the various other art centers o the
civilized world, she has served the cause of modern art as no other
community could have possibly done. What will come to pass after
this rich period of recapitulation has rounded out its term is not
for us to say. There is small chance of going back to outmoded
positions, however. The world today is progressing rapidly toward
POST-IMPRESSIONISM 169
new states of mind, toward new attitudes and receptivities, and in
that direction the story of modern art is bound to proceed.
Advancing along the line of light from power to penetration, we
should ultimately arrive at a period of revelation. Already the sur-
r^alists have coined a new vocabulary, and no matter how valid
their communications may be, they have at least been ready and
willing to try the impossible. The sudden demand for further
streamlining of our equipment today is quite likely to carry over
into our esthetic problems; slipping along our terrestrial courses with
increasing ease, we should find some equivalent in our mental
processes. Picasso has already taken flight at seemingly dangerous
angles: he has touched upon the psychic to a degree unrivaled by
his contemporaries. Surely, in the course of modern art, there has
not been vouchsafed us a more haunting piece of mental conjuring
than his Seated Woman, which dominated Chicago's Century of
Progress exhibition of art last summer by virtue of its fierce intensity
of mood and its macabre enchantments. While others play about
the studios making unusual and often fascinating patterns, Picasso
seemingly gets his supply of ideas from more authentic chambers
of imagery. Securely established in the midst of a most phenom
enally successful and spectacular career, he might well cry out:
"Apris moi, k dtlugel"
As far as Post-Impressionism in America is concerned, the story
runs a more checkered course at least, until within the last few
years. Today, thanks to the enterprise of certain enlightened art
lovers in New York, a museum has finally been established which
permanently houses one of the finest collections of modern art in
this country as well as assuring for the cause the official sanction
of society. From now on, judging from the popular success of
the loan exhibitions at the Century of Progress in Chicago in the
summers of 1933 and 1934, the task of converting America to
modern art should be comparatively easy, not to say painless. The
older museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum
of Fine Arts in Boston, are still strangely unaware that anything
of consequence has occurred in art since the time of the Impression
ists; but such younger depots as the new Hartford museum, the
Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, and the handsome new Wor
cester Museum, as well as several of the more inland art centers,
I7 o AMERICA AND ALFRED STTEGLITZ
make it their business to keep abreast of the times. So far, however,
only Hartford can boast a museum of the fine arts devised entirely
in the modern mode. To the credit of all concerned, Hartford also
rose to the occasion by inaugurating its new museum with a loan
exhibition of works by Picasso that ranked with anything yet
achieved in Europe. The rank and file of good Americans, however,
are yet a long way from sensing any issue at all. We are still rather
too inclined to suspect this new art, hailing for the most part from
Paris, as the outcropping of a decadent and worn-out European
society. Characteristically, foolishly, pardonably, perhaps,^ we cling
to a nationalistic idea of art, priding ourselves on our immunity
from such alien and disrupting influences. After getting off to a
flying start in the field of mechanics, after grasping to such a wide
spread extent the metaphysical aspect of this electrically conditioned
era, it is strange indeed how laggard we remain when it comes to
esthetics.
Until the famous Armory Show in 1913 put Post>Ijdapra$icmism
on the map, art in America stilBtored from provincial taejma. There
was little or nothing m our artistic make*trp to keep us abreast
of the times. Only at tbe dose of the *eigMe$ did such names as
Van Dyck* Hals, Remkandt, and Turner appear in the catalogue
of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum, thanks to the Marquand
Bequest. The average buyer at that time was busy acquiring
Bouguereaus and Meissoniers, favorites who gave place to the Bar-
bizon masters, who in their turn were superseded by Mauve and
Israels with their pearly sentimentalizings* Inness was the principal
American challenge to these importations: and he must have en
joyed a considerable local patronage, for the Metropolitan Museum
lists the acquisition of two important canvases from his hand as
early as 1887. The big money, however, went for such works as
Rosa Bonheur's famous Horse Fair which fetched something like
fifty thousand dollars at public auction, while for Meissonier's
equally spellbinding 1815, depicting Napoleon surrounded by Ms
faithful troops, a price of upwards of one hundred thousand was
cheerfully paid Henna's alabastrine nudes wore popular items in
fin de siMe commons, and Detmlle's martial numbers were also
much the vogue. Realistic "panoramas'* with elaborate plastic lore-
grounds likewise intrigued the art-loving pwblk o that parlous
POST-IMPRESSIONISM 171
period: art "with a message" was the thing, and Millet's Angelus
toured the country with overwhelming success. The Metropolitan
Museum could stage a provocative and instructive exhibition of
these popular "buys" of the 'eighties and 'nineties, listing the origi
nal prices against the probable figures these relics would bring today
at open market.
However, there was one individual in the New York art world
whose sense of values was sufficiently developed to catch the first
oncoming vibrations of the new movement. Alfred Stieglitz, with
a considerable European background to his credit, had returned to
America in 1890, full of enthusiasm for Rubens, the newly dis
covered wonders of Egyptian antiquity, and the possibilities of the
then underestimated camera. It did not take long, however, for
this youthful enthusiast to size up the American situation, to sense
the course of the prevailing winds, and to discern which way lay
salvation. From the beginning, because of his ability to perceive
the immediate significance of each phase of our esthetic evolution,
he has kept several laps ahead of the procession; and this sense of
the contemporaneous has kept him from ever losing sight of art
as essentially related to life. Instead of regarding photographs as
such, or of thinking of pictures as items to be marketed like securi
ties on exchange, he has insisted on their significance as vital docu
ments of human thought and aspiration, to be kept fresh and alive
and functioning, lest one choke to death on them in the end. Docu
mentary tags and the dusty deadweight of officialdom have never
been allowed to accumulate on any work bearing the Stieglit?;
cachet of approval. From the very beginning of his long labors as
champion of certain clearly defined issues, Stieglitz's forwardness
of vision has automatically kept him in the limelight as the leading
exponent of living art in the New World. Instead of waiting for a
convenient season in which to acknowledge some special talent,
instead o waiting to see how well early promises were kept, he has
continually matched each phase of art the moment of its emergence
with an equally Immediate acceptance,
For this reason Stieglitz was the one inevitable focal point where
the first Intimations of Post-Impressionism in America were to
register with any outstanding effect. The Impressionist attitude had
found echo in much of his early photographic work, but it was not
I 7 2 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
until the more dynamic phases of the modern movement began to
ripple their way across the Atlantic that his sympathies were genu
inely aroused. He took to the new art from the start. Although
his principal concern had been with the issues of the rapidly
unfolding art of photography he had already taken many revolu
tionary steps both artistically and technically the academic com
plications of the photographic coteries began to cramp his free spirit.
Had' there been the slightest touch of commercialism in Stieglitz's
approach toward art, either in photography or in painting, he could
easily have retired years ago a multimillionaire; for it was his privi
lege and prerogative to introduce to America the outstanding men of
the new movement. Long before the average New York collector
was aware of the implications and importance of the Post-Impres
sionists, Stieglitz had hung their work on the walls of 291. But
his only excuse for handling art at all lay in his keen appreciation
of the lasting significance of each esthetic experience as relating,
first of all, to the individual artist, and then to life in general. And
so his returns for handling art on his own terms have been de
posited where no collector of internal revenue would think of
looking. There they are, nevertheless, and Stieglitz stands the richer
in the end.
Now that we in America have become less laggard in the matter
of the fine arts, having caught up with our artistic heritage even
to its earliest colonial beginnings, it may not seem such a colos
sal feat to have been the first to represent the work of C6zanne,
Matisse, Picasso, Braque, and the rest before an Indifferent public.
But to one who has any knowledge of the intensity with which
Stieglitz wages his campaigns for esthetic liberty and freedom of
expression, those early days at 291 have about them a decidedly
Lincolnian ring. Whatever the issue at stake, all through the various
chapters of his extraordinarily active and extended life, there has
been no concession to the second-rate, no deviation from his self-
appointed course to follow die Hae of least resistance. He has con*
tinually courted fate by shaking out a challenge to measure tip to
his standards. From the beginning of 291 up to the present time he
has withstood the solicitations of the crowd, has remained insulated
but not isolated from "the common life" and its deadening values*
Through long years of acknowledging only tine best i& art and life,
POST-IMPRESSIONISM 173
Stieglitz has come to acquire that "toughness o mind" which Van
Wyck Brooks refers to in his study o William James (Sketches in
Criticism) as belonging to "men who have values/' This very
ruggedness has long been characteristic of Stieglitz, for he has stead
fastly looked conventional life in the face and rejected it, "not
through any neurotic need to escape, but at the command of a
profound personal vision." To many this "toughness of mind" is
tiring, troubling, hardly to be endured. While it acts for them as a
barrage through which they may not pass, it serves him protectively
by keeping out those not worth the trouble of admittance. His repu
tation for being blunt and even bellicose has prevented many dis
cerning folk from seeing the real man beneath the protective colora
tion, and many are the recorded incidents where inquisitive and
often unprepared visitors have had their foundations shot from
under them by Stieglitz's sharp inquisitiveness and booming ora
torical periods. His clairvoyant thrusts have caused others to forego
their pleasure in whatever art he may have been showing at lie
time.
Having stripped himself for a battle to the death with the shams
and stupidities of the ordinary round of living, Stieglitz's insistence
on the eternal verities is hardly comforting to the average citizen
content with taking things as he finds them. Brooks complains
that "American society is like a cogwheel that has lost its cogs,"
that we in this curiously compounded country invariably lack con
viction because we lack values, "How much," he adds, "we should
enjoy the spectacle of a sour-faced American Schopenhauer, an
indigestible American Tolstoy, an insufferable American Ibsen, an
incredible American Nietzsche just one true-blue solitary rhinoc
eros," Well, I think we have just such an one in Alfred Stieglitz,
and it is little wonder that from the beginning there has clustered
around him a considerable though shifting body of men and women
artists, writers, thinkers, workers in many fields who have found
in Ms stern and rockbound attitude a place of refuge from the
indecisions o a cogless, overcrowded society, who have relished a
point of contact with one whose life purpose has been so in
domitably maintained, so unflagging in its demands not only on
himself but on those who have come to vision something of his
purpose. A keen !|en$$ of sportsmanship for its own sakp has
J74 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
helped him to run the good race, enabling him to keep on going
long after most men would have been glad to call it a day. This un-J
remitting concentration of purpose, this incessant hewing to the line,
this same sporting sense that led him as a lad to run a twenty-
five-mile race around the cramped circuit of his New York cellar,
has undoubtedly toughened him to the task of seeing the whole
thing through, of supporting the issue of modern art from the
early showing of Rodin's drawings in 1908 up to the 1933 exhibi
tions of Marin and O'Keefle and Dove. By every sign, Stieglitz
was the one man qualified to express in American terminology the
essential qualities of Post-Impressionism.
His own direct contribution to American art has been, of course,
through the camera, a highly objectified and mechanically circum
scribed medium, but for once carried far beyond its ordinary limits
by the sheer mastery of the artist. From the start Stieglitz has
matched the mounting issues of modern art in this country with
clear, well-timed photographic statements, a record that begins
with the early impressionistic plates of picturesque New York by
ways; that merges into the more personal, biting, and boldly con
ditioned studies of the people and places during the Post-
Impressionist days at 291; that includes those lovely lyric interludes
at Lake George which have marked each summer season; that
rises to those rarefied and transcendent Equivalents which would
have sent Ruskin skyrocketing at such profound interpretation of
the heavenly hosts in all their intricate counterpointing; and con
cludes with the thrilling skyscraper studies of modern Manhattan
that climax his photographic career. These latest New York prints
mark the acme of photographic interpretation, where so-called me
chanics give place to a persuasive animus that is indeed the artist's
very self an open demonstration of mind over the machine, if you
like, but, at any rate, photography taken to higher pitch o per
fection than has come to pass at the hands of any of the myriad
practitioners at work today throughout the land* Stieglitz brings
to his camera work much the same sense of sheer veracity and
pictorial penetration that Cezanne brought to paintiag. A bom
cpieraman, a master technician, a poet, a sear, a practical student
of the humanities, a fighter, a sportsman (without a sport), a rare
friend* am acknowledged philosopher and guide, he has forced the
POST-IMPRESSIONISM 175
seemingly conditioned camera to rise to unsuspected heights in a
way that defies analysis. The camera has served him well through
out the years, served as a "cave of his own soul" where he might
retreat to find "new frames of mind, new attitudes, new standards
of measurement.** It has offered him a handy dark-room retreat
where he might enjoy the solitude necessary to every artist.
While Stieglitz was primarily responsible for the rapid develop
ment of photography in America, as well as being a vital factor in
getting Post-Impressionism off to a flying start, he has stood back
of the best of art, no matter of what nature or of what provenance,
with a strict impartiality. It would have made little or no difference
to him if Marin had been a Canadian or O'Keeffe of Mexican
stock so long as the work they produced was definitely alive and
related to the moment. It has been from the beginning art as a
whole rather than any special group or aspect that has commanded
his interest and support. Looking on art purely as a manifestation
of social values in the highest degree, he has naturally attracted to
himself work of special significance. This, especially in his earlier
days, resulted ia his becoming a veritable storm center for all the
radically minded ia the town, but his long-established policy of
nonresistance and watchful waiting have afforded him valuable pro
tection and enabled him to weather whatever crises may have arisen
along the way. At heart, he has always been remarkably cool and
contained, and there must have been many occasions during the
early days of 291 when it was necessary to keep calm in the midst
of the fiery discussions and contretemps of his sometimes too
zealous followers. Even at the Intimate Gallery, there was still
much of the sanctum tanctorwrn atmosphere hovering over the
scene; and it was only when the Intimate Gallery in its turn gave
way to An American Place that the real Stieglitz emerged in all his
elemental vigor and essential simplicity* Perhaps the nature of An
American Place, with its clear-cut, business-like atmosphere and
unpretentious setting (although no gallery in the town was ever
so scmpulously polished and painted), made him realize more
completely than ever before the main idea back of his gallery work.
Here was Stteglitz functioning true to form, a "minor prophet"
(as a somewhat bewildered news reporter had it on the occasion of
his seventieth birthday) in "a makeshift gallery*" Here was art set
176 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
forth like some rare table in a wilderness of bartering and social
jockeying; here the final resolution of the Stieglitz idea as em
bodied in the work of Marin, O'Keeffe, and Dove, the three
Americans who round out a full picture of his artistic credo. The
first two particularly Marin with his intensely masculine outlook
and inspirational approach to art, and O'Keeffe with an equally
intensified pictorial viewpoint springing from the more emotional
nature of the woman would seem to have arisen as if by magic to
complement each other, to provide him with a perfectly balanced
instrument through which to realize to the fullest extent the emo
tional gamut of his vision. Such patronage, where one artist volun
tarily sponsors, inspires, and sustains his fellow artists, protecting
them from the worldly cares that ordinarily beset the creative
thought, and building up for them a following of distinction, is
indeed a labor of love that has no exact counterpart in the history
of the arts. In the case of Marin, Stieglitz has watched him unfold
during the course of some twenty-five years his stand for the water
color as a medium of equal importance to the more showy oil is a
story in itself; and I am certain that the delight in watching the
pictorial thought of this extraordinary artist expand and ripen into
fullest maturity has more than repaid him for the labor involved
in bringing and keeping him before the public.
Particularly at this moment, when art in America seems to be
heading toward a more proletarian basis, does the Stieglitz con
tribution to art and criticism seem more than ever providential,
more than ever an essentially vital step in our unfoldment Without
a certain remnant and a qualified leader, as Brooks points out in
his study of William James, no real development can ever take
place in society. "Values have to be recreated or at least restated
in every social group and in every generation; and when this
re-statement fails to take place, one has the stagnant epochs and
the stagnant peoples." With Stieglitz as standard bearer to continue
refraining our esthetic credo, there can be little doubt that art in
America is safe for posterity, I am equally certain that with the
passing of the years his influence will increase and multiply, will
serve as a mark for future generations to aim at We shall be in
creasingly glad of our "one true-blue rhinoceros/* our "minor
prophet" and his far from "makeshift" gallery. It is this enduring,
POST-IMPRESSIONISM 177
even prophetic note in the Stieglitz make-up tHat will probably
carry farthest down the course of time, if my premises are correct.
The initial idea of light, now grown in power to penetration and
performance, will undoubtedly propel our art along this line of
development toward an increasingly inspirational standpoint. As a
nation we have gone farther in giving woman her place in the sun
than any of our neighbors, and since woman, "clothed with the
sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown
of twelve stars," stands for revelation, it should follow that in" the
course of, say, the next hundred years, American art reflect states
of mind that we today may but dimly discern.
The history of our art is doubtless as fine and honest as it should
be. The first great trio of true-blue Americans Homer, Eakins, and
Ryder affords a firm base for any superstructure we care to raise
(even if we have but comparatively recently seen our way to the full
acknowledgment of their various virtues). Sargent and Whistler,
contented expatriates, have their place as historical ornaments
rather than as solid blocks in the building of our Pantheon of the
arts (although Whistler in his etchings must rate among the
elect). From then on, as the various influences of the Impres
sionists and the Post-Impressionists have affected American art,
the building blocks have become smaller and smaller, although
of such increasing numbers as to make up in quantity what they
might lack in importance. We have today in our midst a greater
array of what may be called second-, third-, and fourth-string
artists than any other country. Our big annuals are marvelous
outpourings of intelligence and skill; they have all the diversity
and animation of a five-ring circus. But out of the first ten, or the
first "Nineteen" as the Museum of Modern Art once had it, there
are precious few who possess the magic touch that will lift their
work into an assured place among the very great. Marin and
Q'Keefie are of this group: they both have something of the
revelatory touch Marin as no other painter living today, O'Keefie
particularly in her early inspirational work, when strange fires
flared up as never before in the painting of any woman. And
since these two artists in particular have been brought up with
such consideration for their peculiar talents, since their art has
enjoyed a unique presentation and environment through Stieg-
i 7 8 AMERICA AND ALFRED STTEGLITZ
litz's devoted ministrations, * something o this special atmos
phere and enfoldment should be devised to carry over into the
future. I should like to see some small art center created to house
the work of Marin and O'Keeffe, to present a carefully selected
group of their paintings in a setting that would let one enjoy them
at their full value. Marin's work, the best of it, being couched in
that little comprehended medium, water color, will otherwise only
be seen in obscure corners of our public institutions where water
colors are usually consigned. The O'Keeffes should be carefully
selected, with special reference to her early work (including the
little-known water colors), in order to bring out the whole range
of her pictorial thought. I should also like to see, placed on the
same level of importance with the Marins and O'KeeflEes, a gen
erous showing of Stieglitz's own work, all the outstanding plates
that he has created during his distinguished career. Then, too, for
good measure, and because they have both figured to a large extent
in Stieglitz's residual group of protege's, there should be a represen
tation of the work of Dove and Demuth, Here would be a metro
politan meeting place for those who choose to think of art as
necessarily contacting the ideal at all times, a rendezvous for those
who cherish the implications of art more highly than the works
themselves, a clinic for such as like art of a medicinal nature, a
rarely suitable monument to the genius of a great American who
managed, through unswerving devotion to truth, to complete "the
arch of his thought."
FLINT.
VIII. THE ARTIST AND THE GREAT
TRANSITION
ALFRED STIEGLITZ'S PRODUCTIVE LIFE has spanned precisely the
period that I call for emphasis the Great Transition. I mean
the forty years o drastic social change that have passed since the
premonitory events of the eighteen-nineties. It was in these forty
years that the First Industrial Revolution catapulted into the
Second; that the wasteful Machine Age passed quickly over into
the efficient Power Age. It was in these forty years that Stieglitz
achieved the distinction of being the first artist to use successfully
the camera, a mechanical instrument, to reveal the organic char
acter of the nature-thing. And it was in these same four decades
that he stood out as the Teacher fighting his cultural warfare,
denouncing and deriding the marts of esthetics, creating the first
unique American Place, and furthering the concept of honest,
indigenous American life* Thus he is both artist and teacher, and
It is as such that he has provided us with indispensable concepts
and an equally indispensable example for the educational recon
struction of the years ahead.
THE BREAKDOWN OF OUR ECONOMIC INSTITUTIONS in the past few years
has radely awakened us to the truly interim nature of our genera
tion. We have been suddenly compelled to recognize that our
Western civilization is not merely enduring one of its periodic busi
ness depressions. On the contrary, it is passing from one cultural
epoch to another, from the first stage of industrialization into the
second.
It is of the greatest importance that all workers who are con
cerned with social and educational reconstruction recognize the
*79
i8o AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
initial character of the industrial stage out o which we are now
passing. The two centuries and more of engine and machine inven
tion, of construction of power plants and factories, transport and
communication systems, and in general of large-scale business enter
prises, have produced for the first time in all history a highly
productive economic system. In many unique respects it was the
first; for example:
(1) The first invention of efficient power-driven machines.
(2) The -first central electric stations transmitting power over long
distances.
(3) The first vertical corporations with their giant concentrations
of capital, their mechanism of automatic, integrated, and inter
changeable fabrication, standardization of parts and processes
and specialization of labor.
(4) The first unhampered application of the concept of laissez-faire
in economic life. Given efficient prime movers and machines,
men, for the first time, were really free to exploit people as
well as things.
(5) The first attempt to organize the collective economic affairs of
nations on a world-wide interdependent basis. As a result six
hundred million people are now dependent on the uninter
rupted operation of a fragile world mechanism of specialized
production and exchange, with fluctuating units of money,
wages, and prices, and an intercontinental market based on
widely varying national standards of living.
(6) The first experimentation with the concepts of political de
mocracynotably those of government by the consent of the
governed, freedom of movement, of assemblage, and of speech,
trial by jury, and the like.
(7) The first experimentation with the concept of education for all
the children of all the people.
We need not multiply cases. Our list documents sufficiently the
initial character of the period of exploitation at the close of which
we now stand. In these and in other ways the stream of events of
the past two centuries constituted the dawn of a new culture. It
was a First Day,
THE ARTIST AND THE GREAT TRANSITION i8r
As a First Day it advanced by utterly unique economic and social
trends. Not only was a new physical civilization suddenly pro
duced: deeper-lying psychological problems emerged as well These
are the devastating social and personal problems with which we
are confronted today. But to understand them and to devise solu
tions for them we must know the characteristics of the social trends
and the human traits which propelled them. Succinctly, what are
the special traits of this first industrial and social revolution of
modern times?
FIRST, rapidity of growth.
For more than two centuries, during the fumbling experimenta
tion of Porta, the Marquis of Worcester, Papin, Savery, Newcomen,
Watt, Arkwright and company, the industrializing process gathered
momentum very slowly. By the middle of the nineteenth century,
however, it began to pick up speed, and the next five decades
from the American Civil War to the World War were a period
of swift expansion. Every phase of it grew at positively accelerating
rates the production of goods, the aggregation of populations and
their concentration in urban communities, the radius of the
market, horizons of communication and exchange, the interconnec
tions of cultures, the time-beat and rhythm of urban life. All was
positive acceleration.
The engineers have recently reduced the past century o growth
to mathematical order, plotting curves and fitting equations to the
trends of production of the basic commodities. They are all
parabolas, and many have equations of high exponents. Whereas
population increased as the square of the time, the curves of pro
duction mounted as the third, fourth, even tenth power of the time.
Witness sted . . . rubber . . . automobiles . . * electric power I The
men in the street as well as the owners in their chambers of com
merce, guided the expansion by a simpler quantitative slogan
"Bigger" and added their aaive concept of quality, "Better." But
the basic idea was the same More! More people to buy more shoes,
more houses, more food. More power stations, more factories, more
cars. More goods to export to "backward" populations. No con-
ife AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
ccpts arc more adequately descriptive of this era of expansion than
this one of positive acceleration.
Not only was acceleration of growth true of the volume of pro
duction; similar mathematical laws governed the swift increase in
the productivity of the worker himself. The equations which fit the
parabolas of "man-hours per unit of production" also have high
but negative exponents. After 1910 the increase in output per man-
hour became so vast that in the early 1930'$ the engineers could
generalize a century of growth in this way: no longer does a rela
tion exist between what a man can produce and what society can
fay for it. Thus have physical power and purchasing power gotten
out of relation to each other. And all this within less than fifty
years after the filling in of the last American frontier.
Second, absorption in physical construction.
Naturally, the first stage of industrialization was an orgy of build
ing. In America, especially, it could not have turned out differently.
Given: isolation from the quarreling courts of Europe, the world's
most favored virgin continent, a population descended from the
Nordic adventurers of trade and migration, and the guiding theme
of life in the nineteenth century was bound to be physical conquest
Dynamic catchwords energized the struggle with geography and
with native owners. Conquer and settle. . . * Build, . * * Construct
. . . Make it big, make it stunning.
Moreover, these concepts of construction were given a patriotic
rationalization. "America" must be built There is not much time,
so hurry. The good of the individual will be guaranteed by aug
menting the wealth and power of the group* Hence build, for the
sake of the country. But do not spend too much. Acquire and
keep. Save for tomorrow. Accumulate* Pile up a surplus in order
that you may invest in more land and more factories and export
your surplus capital to undeveloped lands. Thus also we shall build
America*
Third, undesigned and uncontrolled exploitation*
The virgin -continent, the cyclonic dimate, the drives of human
nature, and the pressure o hordes of immigrant newcomers, all
to a restless haste to get immdkte profits* So every-
THE ARTIST AND THE GREAT TRANSITION 183
thing in the earth was mined the top soil, the forests, the coal and
the oil, the iron, the copper and other metals. Everything in the
earth was taken in a mad, unrestricted, and unplanned race for
gain.
It was an uproarious period of hectic trial and errormostly
error and waste! The concepts of private ownership and free com
petition made "design" in the first era of industrialism utterly im
possible. Although, even at the beginning of the debauch, thinking
men counseled the imperative need for plan and social control,
most of the energetic, shrewd, and ambitious men threw themselves
into the race for money and power and rationalized their conduct
by the French economic philosophers* doctrine of laissez-faire. The
Western man translated the physiocrats' dictum to suit his personal
desires: "Freedom to exploit." . . . "Every man for himself and
the devil take the hindmost." And he did; that is, he took the rank
and file of the people of the industrial countries.
Fourth, the nervous tension of life.
Changes in the tempo of living in the new regime paralleled
those of the new mechanical occupations, transport and communi
cation. Faster and faster beat the basic rhythms of physical life,
"Cutting down elapsed time" became an obsession of the man in
the street as well as of the pony-express riders and the drivers of
locomotives, automobiles, or airplanes.
For well-nigh three hundred years tension has marked the nervous
life of the American. Physical danger on the frontier and economic
insecurity in the jungle of the market served the Western man
alike to produce a continuum of alertness, of restless, hectic move
ment Inevitably the attention span and interest span remained
short
The compulsion of hurry ever confronted the American whether
set by the climatic exigencies o the growing season or by the com
petitive race with one's economic rivals. Hurry! Get it donel Beat
the season, or your neighbor. . . . A higher jump. ... A swifter
crossing. . . * A new record for speed, size, or endurance.
Neither thoughtful design nor contemplation was easy in such
an intellectual climate. Mental life consisted of a succession of fairly
obvious problems, each to be solved by impulsive generalization.
184 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
Naturally, thinking was for most men mere perceptual reaction.
The inhibiting o impulse for moments of thoughtful choice be
tween alternatives became a rare occurrence. Percept ruled over
men's minds, and but few achieved the attitude of problem-solving
and conceptual generalization.
Fifth, the guiding concepts of language.
The grip of the physical and mental climate on men's minds
showed itself in their language. The vocabulary of the Westward
movement either of the frontier or the towns that rose behind it
abounded in action words. Utterance was primarily specification
for construction. Build. . . . Make Do Tear the old one
down, put the new one up. So widely pervasive did these ideas
become that even a child in a city school responded to the question:
"What is the first thing you do when you put up a new building?"
with the confident reply, "You tear one down."
Although on Wednesday evenings and Sundays men monoto
nously hymned the words Spirit . . . Soul . * . God , * Heaven
. . . Rest it was lip service only to the words o meditation and
contemplation.
The nouns as well as the verbs of the Machine Age vocabulary
help to set for us subtle psychological problems. Although sur
rounded by a superabundance of natural resources and of skilled
labor, machine technology was still undeveloped throughout the
nineteenth century. So even in the midst of the enormous produc
tion of the World War and of the "prosperity" of the twenties men
continued to speak the language of an economy of scarcity* Guiding
their behavior were such concepts as: Increased production- * * *
Free play for private initiative. . . High profits. * - Save and
cumulate a surplus. . . . Invest in capital goods.
Moreover, the mutually inconsistent concepts of nineteenth cen
tury economics and community sociology coupled together strange
antagonistic words in the utterance of man; Compete but Con
form. . * . Beat your neighbor but serve him. . . , Laissez-faire, but
the good of the greater group. . . , Private ownership for profit and
public service. Naturally five generations of town and city youth
growing up in an atmosphere marked by such mutually Incon
sistent ideas builded a widespread regime of hypocrisy,
THE ARTIST AND THE GREAT TRANSITION 185
Thus the language was appropriate to the initial period of
physical exploitation. It was the language of defining, not of seeing;
and this was also inevitable in a First Day, in the dawn of the new
technological culture.
4
SIXTH, philosophy became merely a method of solving problems.
One other mental trend seems to me as inevitable as the physical
and social ones; namely, the evocation of American philosophers
and of their pragmatic experimental philosophy. Between the Civil
War and the World War both were produced by the evolving
culture of industrialism. Two thinking men Charles Peirce and
John Dewey blazed the new intellectual paths. 1
Again we see how the culture produced the men and the theory
of life. Peirce and Dewey were surrounded by the driving exploita
tion of the period of American expansion. Both were devotees of
the scientific method. Peirce was practised in the processes of
technology. He was, indeed, world acclaimed for his technical re
searches. He knew the physical basis of the new industrial culture
"internally, in its own terms." Moreover, both Peirce and Dewey
were professed students of logic. How predetermined it was, there
fore, that the life work of each should have been given to formu
lating the scientific method of thought, rather than a theory of
life. Pragmatism (or "pragmaticism," as he called it after his
quarrel with James) was to Peirce, and Experimentalism was to
Dewey, jtist that. It was a way no, the way of thinking. To
neither one was it a way of living. Today, in chaotic transition
years, it serves us as a perfect phrasing of one important kind of
mental procedure, but not as a statement of objects of allegiance
for a bewildered world.
It was, of course, a tremendous intellectual achievement, one
that guarantees the two men an enduring place in the world's
annals of human thought. Standing aloof from the immediate
*I exclude William James because he seems to me to have been much more the
artist than the intellectual philosopher, James's whole creative life, from his youth
ful painting to his warping o Peirce's "pragmaticism" from a method of thought
to a way of life reveals that The point can be made best by comparing the pro
ductive work of James and Dewey*
!86 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
action of the society, and seeing from a height its need for design,
for plan, they saw what most men missed: namely, the prior need
for a clarification of the processes of thinking. A technological
civilization was in the making. The mental processes of invention
and research and their application in the building of America must
be subjected to scientific study. Psychology must be made scientific
in order that a new generation of clearer minds could be produced.
Hence "how we make our ideas clear" became with Peirce, and
"how we think" with Dewey, the orienting objective of a life of
study.
Living in a dynamic changing society they built their psychology
on novel concepts. The first was that of active response. The new
dictum of learning and growth became: We react with meaning;
we do not absorb meaning by some passive process. A generation
later schools began to rebuild their programs of study and their
methods of teaching on the new idea.
Living in the midst of the research physiologists, neurologists,
endocrinologists, Dewey perceived the significance of the integra
tion principle in human behavior. We respond as living wholes
not as aggregates of separate traits. The nervous system, the an
atomy of the body, the viscera, the glandular system all constitute
a unified whole. Moreover, the environment and the individual are
fused parts of the same situation. Experience is correspondingly a
unity. Ends are not separated from means. Mind is not inde
pendent of body. All are fused into one dynamic organic whole*
Body and mind are Organism, not Mechanism. Thus the philoso
pher avoided the pitfalls of the mechanistic theories which trapped
many of the psychologists of his day,
The foundational importance of these two concepts illustrates
the manner in which the experimentalists sensed the scientific need
of the closing years of the First Industrial Revolution, The West
ern world was rushing faster and faster toward the end of an
epoch, and with it overwhelmingly complicated problems of social
control. Whether the pragmatists generalized with respect to the
problems of the economic-social system I am not sure* I doubt if
even they saw that far beneath the surface of the social trend. But
whether they did or not, they succeeded ia building the chief
psychological tool needed in our day for the social control of the
THE ARTIST AND THE GREAT TRANSITION 187
environment. They gave us a clear idea of the method of problem-
solving, an indispensable instrument to the industrial or to the
social engineer.
But that they have generalized too far I am equally confident.
Enamored with the charm of their experimentalism as a scientific
method of thought, they conceived it to be the only way of re
sponse. "Thinking" to them constitutes all of mental activity. The
experimental attitude of inquiry is the only psychological orienta
tion to life. Life is visualized as a succession of problems. And the
steps of problem-solving viz. Dewey's How We Thin\ have
been accepted by them as the only way of decent human response.
Thus they subsumed the two problems of design of our genera
tion social control and self-cultivation under one category. The
deliberate adoption of the problem-solving attitude was accepted
as the appropriate means of orientation to either kind of situation.
All "problems" were regarded as socially set; the end as well as the
content and the method was found in the objective conditions of
the external world, not in inner temperament. From their language
was excluded the vocabulary of mood. The concept of "spirit" was
anathema to their psychology. Appreciative awareness was explained
in terms of measurement and analysis.
Correspondingly, the purpose of art became communication,
message-giving, not self-cultivation. Artistic expression came to be
regarded as language, not self-portraiture. The measure of excel
lence in the product was its rank order of comparison with jhe
products of others, not with one's inner self.
These, then, are typical examples of the propulsive concepts and
attitudes, and the guiding outlook of this First Day of industrial
culture. It is not doubted that they produced remarkable physical
achievements a better standard of living, the general lengthening
of life, the reduction of human fatigue, the increase of leisure
activities, the creation of world-wide communication between
peoples* the building of literacy among 600,000,000 people to name
only a few conspicuous changes which the new temper and ideas
brought about But that they also produced baffling social and per
sonal problems for us who Eve just at the dawn of the second
i88 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
industrial stage is equally clear. Let us note next the manner in
which our transition years were born out of the close of the first
one.
CAREFUL ANALYSIS of social change, aided by the engineers' curves
of technological advance, show us with some precision the approxi
mate time at which one epoch definitely took the shape which
marked its merging into another. The most pronounced point of
change was the short period of the World War, 1914-1918. In
these years population curves reveal points of inflexion, production
curves rise more sharply, man-hour measures change more swiftly.
Premonitions of the coming economic and social changes had, of
course, been heralded a quarter century before, at the very moment
of Stieglitz's return from Europe. Witness : such new inventions as
the automobile, wireless communication, the motion-picture mech
anism, the electric generator, and the central power station; the
sharp changes in immigration from Nordic to Slavic and Latin
Europe; the filling in of the last frontier; the marked drift from
farm and rural village to manufacturing town and city; and the
swift alteration of family, neighborhood, and community life and
of long-established loyalties and allegiances.
From our vantage point of perspective today we can see that
even if the First World War had been put off for another genera
tion, the advance of social trend would have guaranteed that
Western industrial peoples would shortly awake to find themselves
in a new epoch. The probability is very great that the points of
inflexion in the curves of social change would have emerged by
the nineteen-forties. But the war was precipitated in 1914, and did
speed up invention and technological advance enormously before
1919. Moreover, it altered every aspect of industrial culture, piling
up national and international debts, upsetting the relations between
interdependent peoples, and dislocating markets, currencies, popular
faiths, and the march of political experiment
Very few people perceived the accelerating influence of these on
the changing economic-social system for more than a decade after
the close of the war- For seven years dazed America danced on
into another trade cycle of seeming prosperity. This short-lived
THE ARTIST AND THE GREAT TRANSITION 189
period was marked by feverish expansion of production, construc
tion, instalment buying, and the erection of a top-heavy structure
of credit The curves of debt claims mounted more rapidly even
than those of production. The whole economic system became tenu
ous and fragile. Even the people of "education,** anesthetized by
the prosperity (a prosperity that even professed economists as well
as two American Presidents declared was "here to stay"!), threw
themselves into an orgy of speculation. Men appeared really to
believe that an economic system could continue to expand on the
principle that many of the people could live by getting something
for nothing.
Meanwhile, in the research institutes of the great corporations,
invention was subjected to the methods of mass production, and
technological efficiency advanced by great strides. Every phase of
the economic system was speeded up the energy-converting power
of engines, the integration of power, machines and processes in the
automatic factory production; the productiveness of human labor,
and hence the permanent displacement of workers. Even during
the prosperous nineteen-twenties there were never fewer than two
million unemployed workers in America. Competition for jobs be
came fiercer, and standards of living turned downward once more.
Increasingly the bargaining power of the owner and the employer
was enhanced, but the worker lost control over his job, his wages,
his standard of living, and his craftsmanship.
THEN CAME the well-known events of October, 1929, the crash of
the financial house of cards and the shock to the economic mind
of the nation* I have no space, and there is no need, to rehearse
the manifold physical and psychological effects which followed upon
these shaking happenings.
But one result is of far-reaching importance: namely, the dazed
awakening of a thoughtful minority, at least, from the fantasies
of the previous decades, and the vigorous launching of new scientific
studies of industrial culture. The signs of the depression had
scarcely revealed themselves before a brigade of students of the
tcoaomic-social system began producing new analyses of it. In
X9 o AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
I930-I93 1 a whole library of criticism and protest prepared the way
for many careful studies and "plans" for a controlled economic
system. The latter came from the pens of publicists, economists, his
torians, chambers of commerce, captains of industry, labor leaders,
bishops of the churches, presidents and faculties of colleges^
A new body of creative students also entered the sociological
laboratory. Engineers, ousted from their professional work, and
free of the academic blinders of classical thought, graphed economic
history and fitted equations to the curves of the trend. World-
renowned scientists applied their concepts of energy and life and
their scientific methods to the study of the economic system. Thus
the current years have launched what promises to become the most
creative period in the history of modern thought and social organ
ization*
As a consequence, it has been made clear to us that we today
are caught between two stages of economic and social change.
These stages are, at bottom, very difl erent. A few contrasting char
acteristics will illustrate the difference and set the chief cultural
problem which our generation must solve*
First: Whereas the first epoch was one of expansion, of posi
tively accelerating growth, the second is to be one of consolidation.
As a single example, consider the change in population growth.
Although the American population doubled every twenty years
from 1790 to 1920, it has now reached a plateau; births and other
accretions only barely equal deaths and withdrawals. No longer
can the concept of "more people" motivate the operation of the
American economic system. Our language must now discard that
concept and use that of a "static population."
Second: The orgy of sheer physical building is over. The major
part of the economic system is erected* We have passed out of the
wasteful Machine Age of crude steam engines, slipping belts,, and
creaking pulleys and gears into the Power Age of efficient giant
generators, long-distance power transmission, and automatic con
tinuous straight-line process factory production* The implications
of this for thinking mca are clear; they cannot deal with the
problems o the new day with the concepts of the old one* For
example, we no longer Iwe in a regime of scarcity; w$ hmte already
passed into the day of potential plenty* For thf first time in the
THE ARTIST AND THE GREAT TRANSITION 191
world's history man in America can now produce a civilization of
abundance for all. And our language and thought must from now
on show that we know it.
Third: The initial exploitation for immediate private profit and
personal aggrandizement of the first epoch must give way in the
second to designed and controlled production for the total group.
Our new era of plenty is only a potential, not an actual one. To
bring it into existence will require the building of a distribution
system which is coordinate in effectiveness with the production
system which has already been erected. But to do that in a demo
cratic society, many minds must be made aware of the necessity
of deep-running changes in the ownership and operation of basic
utilities and industries.
That is, new problems of social control now confront us, and to
deal with them we must build a new language of discourse. In a
regime of initial exploitation of virgin continents, the concepts of
laissez-faire, of success via competition, were useful, perhaps indis
pensable. But in a regime like our own, (i) in which an efficient
production system has already been erected; (2) in which there is
no longer any relation between what a worker can produce and
the share of the social income which society can pay him as pur
chasing power; (3) in which it is increasingly evident that profits
and fixed charges take an undue proportion of the social income;
(4) in which competition interrupts the operation of the system
and withholds much of it from use; in such a regime, I say, the
concepts of scarcity, laissez~faire f private ownership and control of
basic industries and utilities constitute the vocabulary of a foreign
and useless language.
Fourth: As a final illustration, we must note that intellectually
and spiritually the second industrial age is also new. We have
moved from an epoch which demanded action and percept above
all things^ into one in which design and realization are possible.
Indeed, two crucial problems of design confront us in the Great
Transition. There is first the problem of designing a social struc
ture that will produce the economy of abundance which is guar
anteed by our resources and our technology. There is second the
problem o designing a creative and appreciative personal way of
life within that structure. The nub of the former is social control;
192 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
that of the latter is self-cultivation. The guide to the former is the
technologist and experimentalist; the guide to the latter is the
artist. The truly great culture on the verge of which we now stand
cannot be ushered in if either of these problems of design is ignored.
The documentation of the preceding pages provides abundant
evidence that the problem of designing a controlled social struc
ture is being vigorously attacked. The creative activity of the
students of the "new social order" guarantee that these problems
will not be neglected. Day by day the high potential productivity of
the economic system is being better documented, and more and
more minds are being convinced that the system cannot be run on
a niggardly purchasing power for the rank and file of the people
who must buy back the goods they produce. The brigade of creative
students of social reconstruction is steadily being augmented. Space
need not be taken in this essay to enlist more recruits for that enter
prise.
To SKETCH briefly these sharp contrasts between the two epochs is
to set the chief creative task of our transition years. The passing of
an epoch inevitably produces chaos and bewilderment. So it is with
our current years; they are essentially years of drift, of lack of
direction, of confusion of problems, of ends, of next steps. Hence
the dire need is for clarification clarification of trends and factors,
of problems and ends; clarification of alternative courses of action,
of probable consequences, of loyalties and allegiances.
But for the clarification of meaning a new language is needed.
We have seen that the problems of the second stage of industrialism
simply cannot be thought about by means of the ideas and methods
of thinking which dominated the mind of the first stage. New con
cepts must be found to fit the new situations. A new orientation,
born of the current trends, is demanded. We are now confronted
with problems of articulation in a period in which the language of
our childhood must be discarded and a new one devised. And that
will prove to be the major creative task of our Great Transition.
But the solution of these problems of social and personal design
can be achieved only by means of a drastic revolutionary educa*
THE ARTIST AND THE GREAT TRANSITION 193
tional procedure. The Americans, at least a considerable minority
of them, must learn how to combine efficient technological opera
tion with democratic control, to establish government by the con
sent of the governed through education in tolerant and critical
understanding; to develop interest and ability in creative labor; in
short, to apply the scientific method to the Man-Man relationships
and to live creatively as Artist as well as Technologist.
But, I repeat, to consummate these things under a democratic
form of society (and any other form is totally repugnant to most
of us) our recourse must be to education. Standing at the end of
the first industrial epoch and at the beginning of the second, our
problems, both social and personal, are educational ones. New
minds are to be created. New personalities are to be brought forth.
A new orientation to life is to be developed. A new language must
be evolved. But these are all products of education. They can be
brought forth only by many of the people taking thought about
their society and their personal lives. So it is great teachers that we
need in these chaotic years; teachers who see clearly through the
tangled maze of current trends. Some of these must be rigorous
students of social reconstruction; others will be masters of personal
self-cultivation.
Can we expect to find these in large numbers in the present
teaching body of the nation? We cannot, indeed. Teachers, whether
of college or primary school, are adrift. Like the general popula
tion, they are the inevitable product of the mechanical system
which day by day they perpetuate.
It was no doubt to be expected that the rank and file of teachers
in the years of transition would be bewildered, uncertain, lacking
either a social program or a design for personal living. We must
not forget that the nineteenth century was the first in human his
tory in which the experiment of universal elementary education
was tried. Hence it would be asking too much of the first century
of public education to demand that it achieve more than the
administrative thing* That much, at least, was done, not only in
America but also in Britain, France, Japan in all industrializing
nations, Ninety-odd per cent of the children of "educational age"
were herded into "school" and classified into regiments and com-
i 9 4 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
panics. School buildingsin America very efficient ones were
erected to house them. Teachers were brought together in "normal
schools" and taught what "the book said." Courses o study of in
tellectual subject matter and sets of textbooks were prepared and
graded to fit the year-groupings of the young people.
Thus in a century of hustling physical construction, a graded
school system, national in scope and fitted to the chronological
development of childhood and youth, emerged in every manufac
turing country. Within it education was conceived to be: (i) some
thing that went on in a "school," five hours a day, one hundred and
eighty days a year, apart from the home and community life which
created it; (2) something one did before entering life a prepara
tion for life; (3) something one did with books, with words, not
with the body, the spirit, all the sensibilities, the entire organism.
This, then, was the outcome of the first century o universal
education. In every industrial nation the result was much the
4ame a standardized mechanism, a national replica of the tech
nological culture that sponsored it, perfectly appropriate to the
mechanistic psychology that guided education within it. Most of
the administrators and teachers were conformists and routinists fol
lowing a disciplinary psychology of ancient history* And of those
in the mass school who were "forward looking," the vast pre
ponderance went with Thorndike and the behaviorist company
rather than with Dewey and the organic group. Some tens of
thousands were exposed more recently to the concept o active,
integrated response, but of these only a very small number really
understood the theory and its implications for curriculum and
learning*
Teachers, then, have come out of colleges and normal schools
utterly lacking either in personal philosophy or sense of social direc
tion. Confronted by this crisis they lack understanding either of
the pressing economic and political problems or of the historical
trends and factors which produced diem. Faced with the task of
total reconstruction of the school program they flounder helplessly.
Hence their need, like that of their poople, is not only for a social
program; it is equally the need to build a persona! philosophy o
Jiving^ And for these there are two types of teacher and guide
the technologist of social reconstruction and the artist.
THE ARTIST AND THE GREAT TRANSITION 195
8
THANKS to four centuries of scientific inquiry, and to the ex
perimentalists' heroic efforts to phrase the scientific method of
thought, the sources for a new language and a new theory of social
control are fairly well developed. Certainly it should not be a
superhuman task for the creative energies of Western men to con
struct in the next generation working hypotheses for a collective
society. It will of course be infinitely more difficult to put them
into practicable operation, with the log of intelligent understand
ing and the social control of education and the other agencies of
communication among the chief obstacles.
But the real danger of the Great Transition is that its creative
minds shall take their cues solely from the students of social con
trol, either the practical technologists or the theoretical experi
mentalists. For the problem of designing a personal way of life
appropriate to the new Second Day of industrialism not only
parallels in importance and difficulty that of designing the new
social structure itself, it is in addition a different problem. Men
must live with themselves as well as with their fellows. This
presents the unique problem of appreciative awareness and self-
cultivation. The danger is that men of creative potential, absorbed
in the insistent social problems of the day, will ignore the equally
imperative task of self-cultivation.
That brings us to the artist, for he is the master of self-cultivation.
Whereas the scientific student of society supplies us with concepts
and methods with which to build a new social order, the artist
supplies us the key to the design of personal living. The concepts
and methods of both are necessary. No matter how efficient its
technology or how humane its government, no culture will be truly
great if it does not instil a high order of appreciative awareness in
the people. It is clear, therefore, that the adventure of beauty calls
us as well as the effort of reason*
Herein, I think, lies the true importance of Alfred Stieglitz to
our troubled times, and the reason why we should celebrate his
life by striving to see the r&le of the artist in the difficult years
ahead. He is important because he integrates the twofold r61e o
the artist and the teacher ia one personality. In an economic period
196 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
in which it was practically impossible for the true artist to secure
an audience and earn a competence, Stieglitz has, in spite of
obstacle piled upon obstacle, maintained his integrity as a creative
artist and a teacher of Man-as-Artist.
As for the former he imposed upon himself the task of employ
ing the most difficult medium of all the means of personal expres
sionthe camera to portray organic life. That is, he employed
Mechanism to reveal Organism. Most of his contemporaries in the
arts painters, sculptors, dancers, and others used the more natural
means of expression, die human organism, to portray organism;
most of these succeeded only in achieving superficial photography.
Their art products were little more than representation of the
superfices of life. Thus Stieglitz has served his baffled era first by a
life of creative expression, by giving an example of the true artist;
in his case by using a mechanical instrument to lay bare the mov
ing life below the surface of organic nature things. For this achieve
ment alone his record will persist long.
But in addition to the example which he has set he has served his
times more direcdy as a great teacher. I refer to his quarter century
of heroic effort, first to establish and maintain a purely American
Place, and second, to help the artist to become articulate and to
clarify his meaning of life and its portraiture.
In the former effort Stieglitz is the continuator in our time of the
tradition launched by Emerson and Whitman and Louis Sullivan
in their respective generations of American development. These
men also strove to create the tradition of the American thing* They
tried to visualize the unique indigenous American person, and
through multitudes of him, the honest creative America, This, as I
see it, is Stieglitz's great contribution to our day, for in 291, in the
Intimate Gallery, and in An American Place he sheltered and
prodded, disciplined and encouraged, a fine company of struggling
and harassed creative Americans*
In the fullest sense of the word every community In America
should have its American Place, This would be the true culture
center in which people would come together both for personal self-
cultivation through creative production and for social participation
in the cooperative community. In such a place Pason~hoiie$t
efficient, and integral Persons- would be produced. Each person
THE ARTIST AND THE GREAT TRANSITION 197
would respect and admire the integrity and efficiency o each other
person. In such a cultural milieu the life of honest integral acts
would be lived. The great society would be guaranteed because
great individuals would be the product. To such an American
Place the current widespread mode of hypocrisy would be an in
credible way of life. The very basis of life in it would be the
integrity of each human act the spoken sentence, the answer to
another's question, the production of any craft goods, of a book, a
verse, a house, a dramatic scene. Each human act would be accepted
as an honest objectification of the self. Each Person would be
accepted as Man-as-Artist, striving constantly to speak, to write,
to make, to live, what he is. Because of his personal philosophy of
life that he had evolved himself, each would utter only what he is.
It is such a cultural milieu that I visualize for the ideal school;
hence my admiration for Stieglitz's exemplification of the traits
needed most in the American teacher. His American Place is a
nurturing place; each school in America should become a true
American Place. In a great society, "the school," in the broadest
sense, would be the culture nurturing place, the true center of the
community.
But Stieglitz has nurtured the artist in ways other than by prac
tising his own art creatively and by sheltering the artist and ex
hibiting his products. He has furthered also the artists* struggle
with the problems of articulation and clarification of meaning. And
the need at this point is a dire one, for while the vocabulary of
social control is being steadily augmented and a dearer theory
evolved, that of personal culture is being sadly neglected. Most
artists are, indeed, inarticulate about self-expression. Few of them
write, and fewer turn their insight into verbal studies which will
promote general understanding. But Stieglitz, through his publica
tion of photographs and of essays, verse, letters, and other personal
documents, and through his talk, has contributed to this crucial
problem of clarification of meaning.
Many of the writers in this volume have commented on the fact
that Alfred Stieglitz is always talking. I have long felt that as one
of the most desirable qualities of the Place. I have, in fact, always
sent my students to him with the direction, "Go, and look at
Marin and O'Keeffe and the others on those clear walls, and if
198 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
Stieglitz believes you are sincerely trying to find something there
for your life he will talk to you. His talk may appear to be unor
ganized, if judged by academic standards. It may seem disjointed
and even superficial to the casual listener or the pragmatic problem
solver. But don't be a problem solver in his presence. Strive to be
receptive and aware in listening to his talk as you will in becom
ing alive to the pictures on his walls. Remember that this man is
struggling with novel problems of articulation and meaning, tie is
honestly striving to find out. And that alone justifies both speech
and audience. Without systematic psychological design he is con^
tributing his bits to the structure of a new language of appreciative
awareness. Don't look for the everyday vocabulary of thinking, and
don't pass over what may seem to be superficial comments. Look at
the pictures of life on the walls and listen to the talk about life
from the Man. Moreover, go back again and again and continue
to look and to listen."
These, then, are the traits and the function of the American
Place and of the Artist and Teacher who Hves in it. These are
-what I crave for ten thousand centers in America. At last they
can be produced if we will become sufficiently aware o the f>ro1>-
, and 4 we commit ourselves to its solution.
IX. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF STIEGLITZ
FOR THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
W[AT IS THIS MAN SticglitZ?
He himself has said that he is a workman who has been
all his life on a strike.
Stieglitz has lived to do many things which are nevertheless
always the same thing. He has lived to protect life: he has lived to
shelter beautythe all enveloping subtle beauty which interprets
life, orders life, and gives it meaning. Stieglitz has seen very clearly
into the significance of art he seems almost to have seen the
human spirit itself. The intense life of this spirit is its expression
in art, and this life that flowers into beauty is so fragile, so tender, so
beset with dangers outside and within itself. These perils are many,
and the most insidious of them is the domination of the will-to-
know.
From out o these enveloping dangers Stieglitz gives an in
carnation and a home to beauty. This he does in many ways to
some extent in every contact, however slight: it is a part of his
being alive. His epitomized expression of himself is his photog
raphy, which is one of the most direct expressions the human spirit
has ever achieved; direct and at the same time rich in its contacts
with subtle complexities which prolong themselves into arboriza
tions extending infinitely into mystery. He says many things in his
photographs, but he also says many of the same things in words
and inevitably in deeds. In various places he has hung on the walls
the work of various artists, and he has worked to protect the pure
life of true intensity, whether that life is in the artist who is trying
to speak or only in the person who is trying to hear and to see.
200 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
For Stieglitz is not concerned with individuals but with forces at
work forces which exist in various persons in many degrees of
purityforces which are attaining their maximum effectiveness in
our time in such artists as Marin and O'Keeffe. Stieglitz has worked
to protect even the physical life of these artists who are such im
portant sources of significant life for all people. But while pro
tecting the source he is always ready to give ear to the frailest
voice of new-born truth in any of those who come to see the pic
tures that he has hung.
These people who come: they are the casual public in which
everything exists thrust and counter thrust God and Devil. In
them the world comes to Stieglitz, and he listens to them and says
to them the things that his life is always saying in a thousand
ways. He hears their voices and reenforces what is in them that
is of the good. For there is always to be heard the voice of the living
beauty, and often it is struggling against the lust for knowledge.
There is the girl who says, "I love this picture," and there is the man
who says, "What does this picture represent what is the meaning
of it why do you consider it beautiful?" Stieglitz's answer to the
man is, "Why is a woman beautiful?," and then Stieglitz goes on
to say many things which mean that some things cannot be told
essentially we cannot learn from words because words are no
greater than are we ourselves. Words are always less than we are
-^sometimes very much less.
Wagner's King Mark thought, when he had been told about the
Liebe$tran\, that he understood life and could control living. But
could he alter the course of conflicting loves by his desire for
renunciation? Tristan and Isolde could not live: together they
achieved the all-excluding death which together they had chosen
at the first. The knowledge of the Uebestmn\ acted to protect
King Mark from the realities of death and love that knowledge
gave him less contact with life instead of more*
And so the reality of the meaning of a picture cannot be ex
plained, it must be seen; the living life of the picture must fuse
with the living life of the man who sees it he must drink it he
must eat this body-of-Christ -he must let it enter into him until
he knows it in the same way that he knows that he himself is
himself. And no man can help him in this knowledgebeyond
STIEGLITZ AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 201
showing him the picture, and shielding him from false sophistica
tions. As for the artist who creates beauty he must know surely
that he does not know what he is doing -he knows that he dare
not even look to find out or looking, Orpheus he will become,
with his beloved lost.
Must no one look? Is all knowledge delusion and a snare of
sophistications? What is our science has it any real life or is it
just a set of rules in a mechanical game rules which hold some
times and then sometimes do not hold? In the daytime this game
of science is very absorbing. In the daytime we are safely enclosed
under the blue dome of the sky, everything can be seen clearly,
and all is rational and safe. But at night at night we see that the
blue dome was an illusion, all about us is infinite space infinite
mystery outside and within. Science, what is the night?
In our far-off beginnings, when the desire to know first opened
its eyes, science and religion were indistinguishable. They were the
expression of man's first awe and love and wonder of the world
of mystery which surrounded him. And so also art arose to express
these feelings. Albert Einstein has said:
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the
source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger,
who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as
dead, his eyes are closed.
However, in the mle of our exuberantly verbal and triumphantly
systematic civilization, art and love and religion and science have
all become separated and have all become intellectualized. All alike
suffer in the same way, although the devitalization of art and
religion is more apparent to the man in the street than it is in the
case of science. Science seems, judged by its practical results, to
be exhibiting exuberant vitality. Could anything now be wrong
in science?
It is the fortune and the misfortune of science that it can go a
long way without breathing. Each time science really draws a
breath, so much can be done with it that it is not necessary to
breathe very often; in fact, it may be actually inconvenient.
Science advances in two very different ways. To take the more
obvious way first, science is developed by taking as a basis known
202 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
properties of things and measuring them more accurately, or more
thoroughly, or under experimentally varied conditions, whereby
certain already established patterns of concept relations may be
strengthened, clarified, limited, extended, or negated. In this way,
by proceeding step by step in logical sequence and in honorable
toil, vast technical advance is made, and also theoretically valuable
data are accumulated whereby important generalizations of our
knowledge become possible. This aspect of science is easy to justify
economically and consequently affords an occupation to large num
bers of people. But this logically developed scientific activity is al
ways based on sensually apprehended properties of things and how
is our awareness of these properties achieved? How else but by a
direct perceptual apprehension which fuses to the sensual percep
tions of the artist without absolute demarcation. It is from a kind of
direct communion of the spirit of man with external reality that
there arises in the minds of men a fundamentally new conception
of a property of nature. It is when this thing happens that science
draws a breath.
The fact that the newly apprehended property o nature is natural
does not imply that it is simple it may or may not require elaborate
experimental technique or elaborate ratiocination for its detection.
Whether or not the newly apprehended property is classified as
important fundamentally would seem to depend on. the extent to
which the new property is general in nature, but the degree to
which this can be determined at any one time depends on the degree
of advancement of science in general, as well as upon the intellectual
skill of the observer.
The scientist, then, always is privileged to yearn and wonder and
muse over strange little things that do not seem to fit in the estab
lished system of conceptual relations, and this yearning over tender,
delicate little strange things, this sense of wonder in the face of
nature's mystery, seems at present to be qualitatively as close as
man can get to an understanding o nature. Quantitatively the com*
munion can be enormously increased as our scientific awareness of
phenomena and their interrelationships is increased actually who
can teU the possibilities o the future in this awareness of com
munion? We do not sit down and think out in the abstract what
our future scientific progress is to be,
STIEGLITZ AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 203
D. H. Lawrence says:
The mystery of creation is the divine urge of creation,
but it is a great strange urge, it is not a Mind.
Even an artist knows that his wor\ was never in his mind,
he could never have thought it before it happened.
A strange ache possessed him, and he entered the struggle,
and out of the struggle with his material, in the spell of the urge
his worJ^ too^ place, it came to pass, it stood up and saluted his mind.
And in that way science takes another breath.
Science demands o its greatest followers that they be capable of
great living direct perceptual insight, roving hearts and eyes which
forever refuse to be bound by their intellectual conceptions and
in the same breath they must be capable of intensive intellectual
use of concepts. This duality of the greatest scientific natures we
are inclined to forget. Far more of our so-called scientists achieve
intellectuality than retain a sense of wonder. Men become expert
technicians and can no longer look on nature face to face. All too
often men judge science by certain dry-rotten academicians who are
credited to be scientists and forget that the real science is a far
deeper, more mysterious communion with reality than the majority
of professional scientists could remember they had ever dreamed of.
Our minds, in the grip of the will-to-know, demand that science
explain phenomena. A student wants to know what electricity is,
and why it is as it is. He takes a course in physics and learns cer
tain things about electricity, certain laws which govern its action,
It then may happen that he feels baffled because he cannot under
stand why these things are so. He may even feel that he cannot
understand science, that it is all beyond him. But he is asking for
too much, and the truth is that science does not explain electricity,
it merely describes its properties. So the artist does not explain his
picture, he merely creates it. Will science ever be able to explain
the properties of matter? Who can answer? Meanwhile it lures us
on.
Our scientific pattern of the universe at present is composed o
certain descriptions of comparatively separate categories of phe
nomena. The thing as a whole defies description. although we are
inclined to forget our ignorance in our self-satisfaction at what we
204 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
have achieved. The comparative insignificance of the scientific laws
which have been formulated up to now may well be epitomized by
these remarks of L. J. Henderson:
... the process of the evolution of the earth appears ... as a con
tinuous production of many systems related together in an orderly
manner from few original systems, and ... these systems are not only
very numerous but also very diverse and often very stable. Further, we
have seen that there is ground for the belief that the more important
conditions which make possible this evolutionary process are the specific
characteristics of matter and energy as they cooperate in the process,
rather than the most general laws of physical science.
So our vast systems of knowledge can only conclude that the world
is as it is because it has certain properties. Nevertheless, the inter
relationships of these properties reveal most wonderfully ordered
activities in nature.
The spirit of Stieglitz expresses that which is at the tip of the
arrow of the direction in which our nature is working to move.
That tip of the spirit strives to put man's psyche in relation to all
the enveloping mystery in which man is swallowed up the mys
tery that makes of man's own soul an inward unknown surrounded
by a little shell of mind, floating in a vast sea of unfathomable
universe. Art in its pure self is an expression of the intuition of the
human unconscious regarding its own unknown life of sensation
and emotion. Science is an approach toward the whole mystery
using a different technique a technique whereby the sensuality
of color and sound is replaced by the sensuality of thought.
Science yearns over nature, as does art, trying always to touch
with the sensualities of its truths, creating as it moves on always
new perceptions of beauty in new truths or new enticing* luring
mysteries. So as it goes it accidentally throws back over its shoulder
telephones, X-ray machines, vaccines: conveniences for the body
and perhaps inconveniences for the mind*
Living art leaves in its wake organisations of line and color and
sound which speak much more directly to the longing and wonder
in our minds to the intuitively alive person art speaks directly-
only needing as connection the impress life has made on us or on
our ancestors. Through the crevasses wWch ecstatic joy or suffering
STIEGLITZ AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 205
have broken through the insulation of the soul through these
crevasses art can enter and communicate with the soul directly
pour through man's being its strong current. One of the chief differ
ences between art and science is that, although science requires
no greater discipline of its active followers than does art, it cannot
give nearly so much at second hand. A scientist can "enjoy" art
but docs an artist ever "enjoy" science? An artist can speak to all
who are alive by contrast a scientist is held almost incommuni
cado.
Yet art and science is each in its essence adoration of the one
mystery through different types of sensual touch. And Alfred
Stieglitz, in serving the essence of art so valiantly, in so uncom
promisingly taking his stand to keep alive the fragile and easily
thwarted instinct in man to achieve a valid and direct nonintel-
lectualized communion with nature in doing these things Stieglitz
has served not only art but also and no less science. Hermann von
Helmholtz once wrote, when thermodynamics had just been born,
"Our generation has continued to suffer from the thraldom of
spiritualist metaphysics. The younger generation will doubtless
have to protect itself against the thraldom of materialist meta
physics." We are now that younger generation, and Alfred Stieglitz
has long been to us an unerring protector.
To return to Stieglitz's championship of the right of the picture
to speak for itself: he can do this because he knows that in the
scientific sense the picture is a real force which can actually cause
a given effect in its beholder. Stieglitz has not only loved art, he
has loved people also, and so, loving both people and art, he has
studied their interactions. He has seen that certain abstract pictures
cause certain effects in people that these effects are reproducible
from one person to another: they are not arbitrarily variable but
they fulfill the condition of regular manifestation by which science
is accustomed to establish the existence of material phenomena. So
that extra-verbal perception is far from being reduced to an arbi
trary stimulation with an unpredictable result. Naturally, the mani
festation of the result may vary, since people differ greatly in the
degree to which they react and in the degree to which they are
able to express, or even be conscious of, their own emotional rcac-
206 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
tions; nevertheless, the emotional reactions occur as regular results
o truly existing forces.
The reality of the action of a picture on people becomes most
starkly evident in the case of an abstract picture: abstract in the
sense that it does not represent any physical object. Such a picture
is born of subconscious emotional symbols in the artist. These
symbols can speak directly to the emotions of the beholder if he
has been somehow sensitized by life or else not blinded by life. An
abstract picture is one which is completely free of extraneous
associational appeal hence one in which the reality of art is present
in its greatest purity. If an abstract picture is less powerful than a
realistic one, it is because its art is less powerful, the power of the
realist is not a result of his realism. I am enabled to say this be
cause of Stieglitz's photographs, many of which are abstractions
in the sense that they do not present images of physical objects.
To say that a photograph does not present an image means that
the image of the thing has only the significance that paint has as
paint. Such abstraction existing so clearly particularly in photog
raphy is a challenging commentary on aU art It is Stieglitz speak
ing.
There is furthermore something of tremendous general import
implied in Stieglitz's philosophy which is also implied by the gen
eralizations of the scientist Lawrence Henderson. These two men,
with completely different materials, are both pointing in the same
direction, as would two different parts in the design of a picture.
This picture is none other than the essence of our very lives; it
contains ecstasy* and also it contains the crucifixion against which
one writhes in impotent rebellion, and perhaps it also contains
peace.
The current philosophical conceptions with which science has
replaced the religion of former generations emphasize the unim
portance of the individual The explanation o physical phenomena
as resulting from statistically random variations in molecular and
sub-molecular entities is not edifying to contemplate; it reduces life
to a game of chance. The conception o evolution as a resultant of
random mutations and survival o the fittest: this neo*DarwMaa
statisticism, if it was ever actually accepted* would annihilate
STIEGLITZ AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 207
Nature's precious race by annihilating the individuals o which it
is composed. For the necessary thing about life is that it seem im
portant to the one who is living it that the game be worth the
candle.
When religion satisfied men it gave them the continual conviction
that God was ever present and ever powerful in their daily lives.
Man could accept in living peace the sorrows o Job if he con
tinually believed that God sent them a God just and good and
powerful and purposeful beyond his understanding. But if one
believes that sorrow comes to one from chance, because a certain
proportion of people always suffer owing to a chance unfortunate
combination of hereditary and environmental influences in the
bitterness of such sorrow one cries why, why to unanswering
heaven: why must life exist when it results in such purposeless
suffering what possible reason can there be for the miserable con
catenation of electrons that is oneself to struggle any longer to
endure this futile torture? To such sorrow of the individual the
spectacle of the evolution of the race as a result of fortuitous varia
tion and natural selection offers very little consolation. For the
individual can make himself important to himself up to a certain
point, and beyond that personal point he is a small speck in a
seething hostile chaos, unless he can envisage order in the universe,
and, more than that, order in significant important relationship to
his personal self.
Science has recently envisioned a new category of order, which
almost seems as if it might grow to satisfy this terrible need in man.
It is a philosophical truism that an event may have a purposive
cause and a mechanical cause at one and the same time. Thus, if a
man starts the motor of his automobile, he starts it with the purpose
of going somewhere, that is the purposive cause, whereas his act
of putting his foot on the starter is the mechanical cause of the
chain of mechanical events which results in the starting of the
motor. In, this example it is important to realize that the purposive
cause operates via the mechanical cause and that the two are co
existent: the existence of one does not exclude the other. Medieval
science was greatly hampered by its tendency to emphasize the
purposive cause in an arbitrary manner rather than to attempt
the study of the mechanical cause. Modern science studies only the
208 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
mechanical cause: a true and valid approach to the purposive cause
is our most fundamental contemporary problem.
This problem is nowhere more acute than in the attempts to
understand the process o organic evolution. The hypothesis is cur
rent that evolution has resulted from random self-perpetuating
mutations in the genetic units, and survival of those variations
which proved favorable. Although this might account for certain
characteristics, it seems difficult to account mathematically for the
coordination of adaptations on such a basis. Furthermore, it is
doubtful if anyone has ever actually witnessed the occurrence of a
favorable mutation: certainly most mutations have less survival
value rather than more, whereas adaptation to an unaccustomed
and initially unfavorable environment seems to occur frequently.
In short, the problem of teleology, or apparent directedness, in
organic evolution remains quite unsolved. Lawrence Henderson
has pointed out that there is superimposed upon the problem of
teleology in organic evolution a similar teleology in the physical
world. Henderson arrives at this conclusion from purely physical
considerations of the properties of matter. He states:
The unique ensemble of properties of water, carbonic acid, and the
three elements hydrogen, carbon, and oxygen constitutes the fittest
ensemble of characteristics for durable mechanism . * * the fittest for
mechanism in general, not for any special form of mechanism, such as
life as we know it. ... Nearly each of the properties of these elements
is almost or quite unique, either because it has a maximum or a
minimum value, or nearly so, among all known substances, or because
it involves a unique relationship or an anomaly,
Thus the properties of the three most abundant chemical elements
make possible the production of stable and diversified systems in
place of the original condition of unstable homogeneity; in other
words, favor organic evolution.
Nor can we look upon these peculiarities of the matter which make
up the universe as in any sense the work of chance, or as mere con*
tingency. There is, in truth, not one chance in countless millions that
the many unique properties of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen, and espe
cially of their stable compounds water and carbonic acid, which chiefly
make up the atmosphere of a new planet, should simultaneouily occur
in the three elements otherwise than through the operation of a natural
STIEGLITZ AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 209
law which somehow connects them together. There is no greater prob
ability that these unique properties should be without due (i.e. relevant)
cause uniquely favorable to the organic mechanism. We are obliged to
regard this collocation of properties as in some intelligible sense a prep
aration for the processes of biological evolution.
Thus science is faced with the question, not only of the origin of
teleology, or adaptation to a purpose, in the qualities of living
organisms, but with the teleological adaptation of the inorganic
universe itself. We see that what occurs in the organism occurs in
inorganic nature an adaptation to the purposes of life. The two
categories, animate and inanimate, are working together. The
activity of the universe is an organic whole. There is no line of
demarcation between living and not living: all matter is organized
for the end of organic evolution whatever that may be.
So science has come around a great circle, and from demolishing
the old conceptions according to which the sun moved around man's
earth, science finds itself faced with an appearance of teleology
omnipresent perhaps in every quality of the universe. Henderson
points out that the significance of the properties of matter are only
revealed by the passage of geological time. Compared to the im
plications of Henderson's conclusions, the older religious concep
tions appear as child's play.
Teleology, then, is omnipresent, and it is so unattackable from
the point of view of mechanistic science that we seem to be led to
the conclusion that throughout all nature there is a purposive cause
which coexists with the mechanistic cause. Hence it seems quite
possible that any event has a dual aspect, it is a result of a physical
"chance" juxtaposition of forces, and of a metaphysical purpose.
Hence an event may occur as a result of general laws, and yet at
the same time have a completely individual purpose.
The particular personal significance of an event is the meaning
that is revealed in a C6zanne pattern of apples, or in a Stieglitz
vision o a "chance' 1 juxtaposition of clouds or hands. It is that
which gives human meaning to the greatest art. Nowhere is this
purposive interrelationship of all things more consistently presented
than in the work of Stieglitz.
This duality of causation which seems to occur in nature seems
to extend also to one's personal life in a very definite way. In the
210 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
realm of psychological mechanics, one may discern an absolute
and necessary causal relationship of each circumstance in one's life
to the past and to the future. At the same time one may discern a
pattern which seems to be teleologically controlled. For example,
one seems to fail at something in one's life one often fails over
and over again. If one can see clearly and honestly one sees that
it is not life that is at fault, but one's self, because always the same
things happen to one, different in circumstances but the same in
inward personal significance. So one may discern Nature working
on one trying to mold something in one by a long laborious
process. Changes are wrought one molecule at a time. Nature tests
each new call before letting it enter into her established framework.
This molding, this erosion of life what is it but teleology in the
personal sphere? Nature works on our personalities with a definite
dircctedness. Nature is not always easy to understand, and espe
cially when she sends us unhappiness we are inclined to conclude
she is talking nonsense. But honesty and humility and courage,
which together are the basis of art, are capable of coordinating
what happens to us in a way which reveals its significant meaning.
Tragedy becomes a great thing when its protagonist understands that
he is receiving something vital and tremendous from life at the mo
ment when he is most completely failing in what he wanted to do,
Very often we do not succeed in achieving greatness in tragedy
or in discerning any purpose in the apparently blind misfortune
that is always somewhere in the world. Better to leave tragedy
unexplained than to force a false explanation. Our minds cannot
grasp more than an infinitesimal part of the past and future im
plications of any happening. Our immediate world is always
changing: the justice of yesterday becomes the injustice of today,
and our source of glowing happiness becomes our most poignant
sorrow. One may have his life arranged in tranquil joy, and then,
there comes a seemingly arbitrary devastation. Sometimes it only
seems to serve to make one ask why "Why should my happiness
be thus destroyed?" Even to ask that question has Its value. One
may answer: ''Possibly because all things are so utterly interrelated
that no man may be secure in personal happiness while there
roBsans one o his brothers who is unfulfilled,* 1 Aa ideal being
would suffer as much from the sorrow of another as from M$ own.
STIEGLITZ AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 211
merely knowing of its existence. For those o us who are limited in
our sympathy, the interrelations o circumstance perhaps arrange
that we suffer eventually because of the results of the sorrows of
others. Thereby life gives to man, belatedly, ironically, but actually,
an aspect of the divinity which suffers from any sorrow. Each
selfish man is somewhere vulnerable, has some point on which the
chain of causation can work. No one can be sure of security for
his children in a world in which insecurity exists. Sensitive natures
who have achieved what most men consider as the conditions of
personal happiness, become then explorers in the realms of sorrow:
they must push on, detecting always new imperfections, their share
of the blows that are welding the world.
The function of the greatest art is to discern and to avow the
teleology in our personal lives, as science discerns the teleology in
the external world. The utter purposive arrangement of all things
which the scientist Henderson discerns in physical matter the artist
Stieglitz sees almost every minute in the personal eventual world.
So seeing, one can have nothing but complete faith. Every single
thing that happens to one is literally and absolutely the speaking
of God. Would God speak always in words of one syllable?
So science has destroyed a god which had died in our minds and
become a graven image, and science and art together seem to be
revealing something infinitely more perfect.
This faith in the complete presence of teleology cannot become
dogma. Science has not proved anything* Science has suggested that
something seems to be shaping itself to unknown .ends but im
plicitly controlled in every detail. Art proves nothing. It simply
exists and can be read. This faith is not based on ideas but directly
on scientific concepts and on artistic feelings. It may fade away if
too strong a light is turned on it, just as a delicate structure in a
microscopic field becomes invisible if the illumination is too diffuse.
There is in all this no promise of anything. But there is a
ubiquitous pattern of directedness in nature. There is the possibility
o faith a faith which not only frees but requires one's entire
intelligence-"- a faith which, like life itself, is forever just ahead,
forever waiting to be realized.
EVELYN HOWARD.
X. THE NEW WORLD IN STIEGLITZ
TE CROWNING FUNCTION of a world is to create the energy that
will destroy it, the idea and form that will replace it. This
activity takes the form of a variant from the world's current values,
and it is often personified in the lives of historic men.
Thus Socrates. He lived at a time when the ethos voiced by the
Ionian school was breaking. Consciousness in these early Europeans
had been a simple awareness of the Whole. The person was not
objective; as a man came to know himself he knew at once the
cosmos. And nature, to man, was not objective; it was composed
of psychic forcesgods, or of one substance as in Thales, Hera-
clitus, and not of elements each real in its own right, This world
in our terms lacked both psychology and science. In its decadence,
the pre-Socratic Greeks needed to become aware of parts of self
and of things. By analysis, they broke up the undifferentiate one
ness of the archaic Mediterranean world; for if the components of
existence were considered independently real, they might be exam
ined and mastered. The dualism of the Eleatics marked the birth
of this new ethos, whose first step was to separate the subject from
the object. Now, vividly in his life, Socrates enacted the division
of "soul" from body and from the things of nature. Like a chemical
reagent, his behavior precipitated the monism of a childlike world
into elements which Plato, Aristotle Europe, would study and
control: the "ideal" of reason and the "material" of nature*
Thus Paul of Tarsus, He lived at the time of the agony of
national Judaism. Early Judaism had not been troubled by the
contradictions of a culture that claimed to be both special and uni
versal But the Law had become too rigid to breathe. The arms of
Rome and the thinkers of Alexandria precipitated the crisis ; uoi-
212
STIEGLITZ AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE 213
versal Judaism, in order to survive, needed to leave its parent, the
national Judaism o die Law, taking along into another body the
passion and the vision. In the life of Paul, who turned the Jewish
Law into a symbol of the captivity of the Jewish nation and made
of Christian Grace the symbol of release, this painful rebirth was
personified and prospered.
Thus (to leap to our day) Karl Marx. The bourgeois-Protestant
culture to which Marx belonged, the culture of eighteenth-century
rationalism and nineteenth-century romanticism and capitalism, had
nurtured the value of individual freedom and its postulate, social
progress, which derived from the notion of individual growth. This
became the liberty of private enterprise, which was capitalism's
method. But now the accumulated enterprise of private persons,
rationalized and organized in business and State, threatened human
liberty. To preserve it, or more precisely to make liberty at last
real, the bourgeois-Protestant-capitalist system, which the ideal of
liberty had fostered, must go. Marx embodied the need of the
bourgeois world to supersede itself in order that its own dearest
values might live.
Thus Alfred Stieglitz. ... I do not say that Stieglitz, like these
others, is a historic figure. A man's historic importance depends not
merely on his intrinsic traits but on the use that is made of him
by following generations. Socrates, Confucius, Paul . . . these are
men who have been deeply employed, and hence historic: it would
be absurd to place any man, whose progeny is yet unborn, among
them. And it must be that there were other men, at crises of tran
sition between worlds, of like quality yet who were not used save
perhaps by family and townsfolk, and hence men of no historical
importance. Possibly Stieglitz is to be one of these. What is certain
is that he embodies and projects for the experience of the coming
generation a variant value within the old world, significant and
perhaps crucial to the new world which all minds feel now stir
ring in the anguish of our epoch. Whether the individual articula
tion of this value which is Stieglitz is to be fecund, whether this
value indeed comes to birth, therefore finally whether Stieglitz
will be a historic man, depends on ourselves more than on him.
Such questions may not here concern me. I confine myself to a
brief description of the variant value in the man Stieglitz, and to a
3i 4 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
swift naming o the New World which the value in the man dis
closes*
2
I HAVE SAID that the nineteenth century was involved in a titanic
contradiction. It had inherited and passionately fostered the ideal
of individual value, of personal human value; yet it lived by means
and institutions, themselves sprung from the ideal of that value,
which progressively threatened to undermine it. Thus technics: a
product of the human will in free pursuit of happiness and enlarge
ment, which in the hands of an exploiting class became an enemy of
human life. Thus Democracy, which exalted the sum of persons to
be the nation, in lieu of a qualitative symbol incarnate in a king,
yet served (since the citizens were not liberated of their ignorance
and lusts) to strengthen a new class of leader who personified and
exploited, not the potential strength of the people but their weak
ness. Thus finally industrial capitalism, child of Democracy and of
technics, which actually rationalized the hold of a few congregated
thieves over the mass of the exploited.
Why did these instruments and institutions for human liberty
become liberty's destroyers? If we analyze them, we have the
answer. At the heart of each element of nineteenth-century civiliza
tion we find the cult of the ferson. Protestantism, rationalism,
rational idealism (hostile sisters), established the mind and con
science of the person as the seat of Truth; Democracy made the
person the theoretic integer of State and nation; the machine aimed
to extend the power of the person; capitalism ennobled in place
of the old caste the privilege and enterprise of the person. Yet
none of these examined what a person is, none demanded a norm, a
discipline, a method, for establishing true persons, Therefore Man
agonized; Man was ia danger of dying. Because the prevalent con
cepts about the person were false, all means to invigorate or to
uphold the person were doomed to failure,
We must remember that the idea that "true persons" had to be
formed technologically created out of the state of nature is as
old as the Hindus, the Chinese, and the Egyptians, from whom
possibly Pythagoras and the Hebrews took their first lessons. But
although precise methods for this purpose have always prevailed
THE NEW WORLD IN STIEGLITZ 215
in the East, the West could not accept them, since they worked
from and toward an unacceptable notion of what the person is.
The Mosaic Law with its more than six hundred commandments
is also such a method. When Paul rejected the Judaic norm of the
person, he rejected not only the Law but all human methods, and
relied on the ecstatic energy of Grace to make what he deemed true
persons waiters, in passive perfection, for Christ's immediate re
turn. Paul's ecstatic energy of Grace has almost vanished, and the
belief in the Second Coming with its concomitant contempt for
human works. Yet Paul's rejection of a human norm of the person
and of a human method to produce real persons has prevailed
throughout the history of Europe.
The creative spirits of the nineteenth century were alive to the
crying need: Save the person, save beloved Man! Yet even in the
lurid light of Catholic Europe's failure, and of the modern tech
nological obsession in all realms of nature, amazingly few envisaged
the primary problem: Learn what Man is and how to produce
him. Much preparatory work was done: in lyrical exhortation
(Blake, Rimbaud, Stirner, Nietzsche, Whitman) ; in analysis of the
mind and of the social body (the psychologists culminating in
Freud and Dewey, the great novelists, the social historians) . Yet by
and large, the individualists, children of Rousseau, took the person
for granted and thought to "save" the person, by withdraw
ing him from the social system; and confused the individual's
barbaric will with the essence of the true person. The collectivists,
realizing that the person is rooted in the social body, prescribed
merely methods for changing that body. Implicit in both groups,
the anarchist and socialist, is the personal value: the need of creating
a culture-bed for persons. But the romantics merely transposed the
source o PauFs ecstatic energy from Christ to "Nature"; and the
collectivists were content with a political-economic method of
revolution* Marx, the greatest of the latter group, was in this sense,
like the anarchists, a disciple of Rousseau: he made no study of
the intrinsic nature of the person, of a methodology of man; he
took his basic human value romantically for granted.
This brings me to Alfred Stieglitz. Born in the North o the
United States during the Civil War, which corresponds to the
earlier revolutionary struggles of Europe that nurtured the young
216 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
Marx, he also was born into the great bourgeois-Protestant world.
He also derives his values from that world, and his work from its
need. That value is the person. In this, he is one with Marx and a
thousand others. But his work has been a searching of the person's
true content, a revelation by his own life of the true person's nature,
and thereby a discipline for his emergence. In this Stieglitz has
been almost alone.
SINCE THE Stieglitzian exposition of the person is simply and
wholly his life, there is no direct way to learn it save to experience
his life by watching him live and living with him; and there is no
direct way to describe it except by describing his life. This de
scription, manifold yet single, is the body of our book. Gradually
the surfaces, depths, forms, exterior relations of this man's be
haviorwhich is his work, which is bis methodology are revealed
in these pages. And the reader who has followed will apprehend
the organic portrait. Now the main forms are there, I draw cer
tain lines along them, as it were with an identifying pencil, in
order to make more visible the difficult because unexampled portrait
of a person.
The reader will have noted two conspicuous traits in Stieglitz.
There appears to be not the slightest demarcation between the
man's values and his humble daily behavior, between his life and
his work, between his being and his doing. Stieglitz, for example,
is never "busy," since any interruption becomes spontaneously his
business; is never "working," since everything that occurs, any
word that is spoken and his reply to it, is part of his work; is never
more intimately involved, less intensely concerned than in any
other event, since all of him is always open and ready to be engaged
according to the demand and capacity of the event before him.
The second conspicuous fact is that the man's incentive is totally
wanting in the will toward self-aggrandizement, whether in terms
of money or of reputation.
These two characteristics are revealing. A class society, such as
that which gave birth to Stieglitz, is a dualistic system splitting
reality into parts which mutually thwart one another and yet
rationalize their destructive separations, The terms soul as against
THE NEW WORLD IN STIEGLITZ 217
body, play as against work, art as against amusement, duty as
against pleasure, etc.; the divisions of men into stranger, enemy,
ally, friend, partner, rival, casual acquaintance, etc., are pointers
not to the reality of man and of life, but to the rationalized con
flicts of our social structure. Each individual, to survive in this
world, must split himself also into a series of responses not to life,
but to the conflicts between the thwarted and thwarting sepa
ratisms of the system. His survival in the discordant whole depends
on the success with which he conforms not to the whole which is
life, but to the discord which is death. His success, paradoxically,
will derive from his acquisition of some sort of separate and
divisive reward which, if analyzed, is seen to be an abstraction
from the whole a taking-away from what other rival individuals
are also seeking. If we may assume that a cancer is a cell which
seeks aggrandisement beyond its integral function in the human
body, we might say (without forgetting that we deal with meta
phor) that our society is a body in which the individual, in order
to succeed, must become a cancer: that our social system consists
of cancerous cells organized into a ruling class, and of subject cells
made morbid and progressively destroyed by the cancer which, in
order to "progress," must end by destroying the entire body. And
the reason why this metaphor appears incongruous is that our very
language expresses the values not of the whole body but of the
cancer.
The two traits of Stieglitz which we have named might be sum
marized as the man's refusal to "split his responses" in accord with
a discordant world: the refusal to accept the language of a cancer
ous system. But these are mere clues to the design. The life of
StiegHtz might be more simply plotted as an ethical triad, consist
ing of a thesis, an antithesis, and a synthesis.
The thesis is the acceptance by the man of all life. I mean "ac
ceptance" in the mystic sense of knowledge of the self as belonging
to the whole, and of knowledge of the whole as belonging to the
self. This acceptance does not preclude criticism of parts or even
deliberate and mortal hostility of parts; it merely precedes and
subsumes them. It is the recognition of a connection with life
strictly analogous to anyone's connection with and acceptance of
his body. Indeed, the simple mystic is one who "knows" the cosmos
218 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
immediately (before analysis or control) as the babe knows its
body. The mystic may not have the word "mystic" nor the word
"cosmos": neither, in fact, is in the language o Stieglitz, whose
words are not vocables but actions.
This thesis of acceptance is variously uttered by the man, as our
book reveals. For example, it is uttered by his relations with friends
a multi-faceted form that is recorded in the Variations, and par
ticularly in the section "The Man and the Place." His acceptance
of a friend may be a mere nurturing. If the friend's life-will is
weak, the influence of Stieglitz may even seem to accentuate the
weakness, since it establishes a kind of protectorate over the friend
forever. If the individual is strong, Stieglitz's acceptance acts as a
challenge, a bringing-forth into the open of the other's essential
problem, a constant call to battle in which the friend may emerge
a victor ... to go on to deeper battle. The thesis of acceptance is
uttered no less in the man's relations with casual acquaintance.
The stranger dropping in to the American Place may be a dividing,
hence death-dealing individual. Stieglitz will touch that theme of
his life, and in all probability the stranger will hate himself find
this unbearable and save himself by turning his hate against Stieg
litz. Acceptance in the sense in which I use the word is not col
lusion: it is dynamic recognition.
The thesis is in the photographs, of course; and here most directly
accessible to the world. It has been said often enough that the
remarkable value of these prints is that Stieglitz has used a machine
as a means for making beauty. This is a half truth. (More or less
directly machines have been used by creative men ever since the
Pyramids were builded, and the machine in the raw is merely an
extended tool a tool within which man's intellectualized will is
integrated, instead of being merely imposed upon it.) The signifi
cant feature in the photographs of Stieglitz is that a man has
accepted the factual world, which a recording machine gives him
to ma\e beauty.
Every artist, of course, accepts his world as the material for his
art; and the bounds of his world are the bounds of his capacity to
experience and to absorb. One may say that every artist accepts, for
the material of his art, as entire a world as possible. And since his
art is a unification of his vision and the objective world, his vision
THE NEW WORLD IN STIEGLITZ 219
in the last analysis determines the world he can accept; determines
the excisions and distortions to which he must subject it before he
can employ it. The so-called "realist" who abounds today is the
shallowest of artists, since what he takes to be the world is a mere
surface record of his dogmatically rationalized senses the record,
indeed, not of direct experience but of an inherited language which,
in turn, is a series of symbols for discordant parts and not for the
whole of life. The "tendentious" artist, moralistic or political, is also
shallow since (if he lives down to his creed) the world he accepts
is within the confines of a temporal program, which means that it
is a "world" delimited by the language of a specific human function
which, being within the world, is not the world. Few artists, in
the past bitter centuries, have had the serenity of vision sufficient
to accept, as the material for their art, an unrationalized and "un-
programatized" world so entirely as Stieglitz. The camera in this
man's hand is his enacted assurance that the material of his vision
shall be as humbly, as minutely, as wholly, the objective world, as
it can be; and his acceptance of this objective world, to be trans*
figured by his acceptance, is the man's certainty that his subjective
vision is true: *".<?., that his vision and reality are one. I have said
that few artists in recent times have had such strength and such
faith. Those few are the mystic artists, the masters who can employ
the whole of life as their material, because of their acceptance of
the whole of life. And the true analogue to Stieglitz with his
camera before a patch of sky, a city street, a face, a tree, a hand, is
no "artist" in the modern sense at all: it is Blake recording his
poem to the Tyger; it is, more precisely, Saint Francis preaching
his adorable sermon to the sparrows*
Magic, the Hindus wisely said, is "a change of attitude," and
acceptance o life, in the mystic sense, is alchemy: it transfigures
the objective world into terms that can be humanly experienced,
and it transfigures personal experience into terms that are sensed
as the mystery, and the good, of all life. By the alchemy of accept
ance, Stieglitz reveals within the common fact, recorded by his lens,
his subjective vision. This alchemy of acceptance is nothing but
the dynamics of the recognition of the truth. For truth recognized
is action. If a man knows life in anything, it is humanly significant,
it is beauty, it is truth. That is the message of these prints. The
220 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
function of the camera is merely to state the nature and degree of
the man's acceptance. The prints are merely one utterance of the
man's thesis.
As his camera works, his life works. The casual encounter, the
crisis of a soul, the dollar problem of an artist, the love of a woman,
the bickering of an antagonist ... all that occurs to the man and
with the man is focused (photographed, one might say) by the
lens of his acceptance of life: is made true, that means, by recogni
tion. And this, I repeat, is as precise of his behavior with a casual
visitor at the Place as it is of his photographic statement of a beloved
woman's breast. The relatedness to the whole is everywhere, and is
the thing. The camera merely proves it, by establishing the essential
equivalence of what it records with what surrounds it. (This ex
plains why a Stieglitz print of a woman's torso or a tree's branch is
never episodic.) But the man's word, gesture, attitude, also prove
it to those who understand his language. The thesis is acceptance,
always, of life: and this means creation, for it means the suffusion
of unity into the chaos of events, of wholeness into the false and
painful fragments of individual existence.
I have spoken of language; I have said that the value o'f Stieglitz's
prints lies in the fact that they are builded, not from the rationale of
an accepted language about "facts," but from a direct unitary ex
perience of the objective world and from the need to know- which
means to "control" this world. But this need is at the source of
language. The prints are, hence, a kind of primary language or,
more exactly, of neo-primitive language. I have said also that the
words of Stieglitz are not "vocables but actions." This must have
brought an incredulous smile to many who know him slightly and
have been bombarded by his stintless stream of talk. But the reason
for their impression is precisely that Stieglitz is trying to employ
words as he employs the objects that he photographs. He is re
fusing to take words as dungs-in-themselves; refusing to abide, as
does the rationalist, by the assumption that each word is precisely
and exclusively what it "means." Stieglitz feels that words, like
separate things and facts, are pointers pointing to what, in ever
widening concentric circles, lies beyond them; pointing to life which
no separate words caa convey. Hence the ever widening circles of
his talk. He is trying to use words plastically in order to build up
THE NEW WORLD IN STffiGLITZ 221
an organic statement that shall be different from the sum o the
words, as a live body is different from the sum of its constituents.
If one lacks the key to this intention, the man's vast circuitous
monologues are verbose; but if one understands his language, the
talk of Stieglitz often takes on the organic dimensions of a page
from Dostoievski. Yet it must be insisted that, although Stieglitz's
intuition about words is profound, his craft in words is faulty. He
is not a Dostoievski. He is a better craftsman in the control of
photogenic objects than in the control of language.
To return, then: the man's thesis is the acceptance always of life.
The antithesis is the refusal of everything that refuses, implicitly
or actively, his thesis. That "everything" is our contemporary cul
ture and civilization. It is our business, our politics, our laws, our
morals, our popular arts. It is the system based on dualistic prin
ciples of individual and class aggression. The antithesis in Stieglitz
is therefore his refusal of the bourgeois-capitalist world. Deep-
embedded for fifty years in American life, this refusal that is the
maa has lived and acted. But deep in the American world, older
than the Republic, lives what I have called elsewhere the Great
Tradition, which is the enacted love of man for God. The antithesis
in Stieglitz, refusal of the present American world, is but the func
tion of what is positive and enduring in the American world.
Thesis and antithesis, together, make the person. What kind of
person, our book endeavors to portray. If we generalize, we find
this to be an "integral" person: one in whom by the dynamics of
acceptance, the elements of everyone, the values of everyone, the
harmonic needs, in consequence, of a hale social body, have come
actually in individual form together: one in whom the value of
life (what we call vaguely beauty and truth) has a realized, func
tioning, individual existence. But everybody, whether he knows it
or not, partakes of the whole social body which formed him, feeds
him, and which toward health or disease he continues. And
everybody above the brute lives by the axiom on which all religion,
all art, all law, all constructive revolution, indeed, all behaviors of
decency, are premised: the axiom that life has value. Therefore, an
integral person such as we have constructed from the behavior of
Stieglitz is one in whom the implicit content and value of all
humans has become explicit and active. The integral person, by
222 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
strict logic, is the true person. The sole real or realized person.
And the reality o a person must be measured by the degree to
which the health of the race and the value o human life has a
focus and an utterance in his behavior.
Such an utterance is the synthesis of the life of Stieglitz.
THE IMPACT OF THIS LIFE upon other lives must be revolutionary.
Stieglitz's behavior, by its contrasting key, brings out the latent dis
cordant motive (from the standpoint of the whole) in every man
and situation he encounters. It reveals at all moments the dominant
trait of our social system, which is the denial of life, and of which
the tendency toward war and the prevalence of unemployment are
but symbols pointing to inward war, inward poverty and unem
ployment. An integral person like Stieglitz cannot truly live except
in an integral society: hence his positive acts are a rebuke of the
world, call forth a constant negative from the world, and are, above
all, an implicit cry for a different world a new world in which
the integral man may live.
This has always been, since all history is a series of class worlds
premised on human exploitation and destruction. And whenever
integral persons have appeared in them, it has been to struggle and
at last to die. For the will of the world must "put them away,"
either by crucifying them or by turning them into gods displacing*
them into some transcendental realm where their example would
not impede the wolfish laws of the day. The life of Stieglitz, also,
has been a crucifixion, in that he has been constantly assailed by the
world which (in order to survive) had to refuse his unitary im
plications; and it has been a constant resurrection, by virtue of the
energy of his own unquenchable life acceptance.
The integral society in which a true person can live will be one
in which the whole, by its normal function, gives health to its
individual components, even as its individuals, by their normal
function, give health to the whole. Such a society implies, no less,
the existence of integral persons. In it, the universal sub-person of
today the power man, the schemer, the prowler, the exhibitionist
and megalomaniacwill be as dangerously out of place as a Stieg*
THE NEW WORLD IN STIEGLITZ 223
litz in Hitlerian Berlin. I by some miracle such a society were to
be established somewhere in the present world with the present
types of sub-persons yet prevalent, they would destroy it and replace
it with a society like our own, a world in which their greed, blind
ness, separatism, servility, and egolatry could again safely prosper. 1
In its barest outlines this integral society may be defined as one
without economic classes; one based on collaboration and not on
exploitation;, one in which the values of life and the disciplines of
leadership will be totally dissevered from the possession of goods.
In a word, a communist society which (as Marx said) will be the
beginning of a human culture, because (as Marx neglected to ex
plain) in such a society alone, true persons can live.
WE AGONIZE in the death of a world: the emergence everywhere of
the hideous leaders of the hour, in. statecraft, finance, art, journal
ism, and what calls itself "religion," is a sign of our world's agony.
The day's command is to mother, from the life of the past worlds
that breathe within us, the new world: not one in which we may
live as we and our fathers have lived, but one in which Man at
last the Man potentially in us all may be born. Myriad creative
men and women, teachers, workers, artists, scientists, toil together,
although unknown to one another, in passionate obedience to this
command; toil in ways as variedly profound as must be the world
in which the new-bora Man the true person with his exquisite
sensibilities and his enormous powers, may prosper. The work of
these myriad good men and women is a symphony; and although
*Q course, such a "miracle" is nonsense. Social evolution is organic, which
means that political-economic change does not come independently of change in
the individuals who make up the social body, who effect social change, and are
affected by it As the true person slowly and tragically rises in the social texture,
its nature also changes (even as any organic substance changes when the chemistry
of its ingredients alters); and the social structure, as slowly and tragically, con
forms to be die matrix for the birth of true persons. The double process can be
divided only arbitrarily, for the sake of language. In the comparatively simple,
formed organism of a man it is impossible to separate mental, physical and
"spiritual" change. In an organism so vastly complex and inchoate as mankind, to
endeavour to dissociate the growth of the true persons from the growth of a true
society, would be to surrender to folly.
224 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
they know it not, the major theme of all their complex music is
the creating" of true persons.
This fact makes manifest the share in their labors of Alfred Stieg-
litz, -whose life is an art form of the true person, whose work is a
method for the creating of true persons.
WALDO FRANK.
VARIATIONS ON THE THEME
I. STIEGLITZ AND THE AMERICAN
TRADITION
As NEW ENGLAND CANNOT be rightly seen save by the light of a
cold Northern sun striking obliquely across stark hillsides,
so Stieglitz cannot be understood except by reference to the dis
tinctive sun which beats on America. Viewed in that symbolical
light, all the volumes and masses of his significance are illuminated.
Yet to be sure that the precise quality of this American sunlight has
been defined, one must explore the American tradition, the Amer
ican character, before considering Stieglitz himself.
Is there in fact an American tradition, by which "American" can
be taken to mean more than a geographical or political affiliation?
Is there an American character, forged on the frontier and welded
into spiritual unity by latter-day Americans? Is there an attribute
of the American soul by which it is set apart from other national
psyches? Surveying our past and our present, one answers yes.
That character, that tradition, is perhaps the last outburst of
romanticism in the Western world, the last crudely spontaneous
outgoing of the pioneer spirit, the last outbreak of childish self-
confidence in a society already turning to sterner disciplines. But
for the centuries behind us romanticism has dominated the Amer
ican scene and the American mind, given our creative workers
the energy for centrifugal and extravagant labors, breathed nostalgic
faith into the artist, set the nation on fire with poetic zeal for the
westward movement, that naive yet passionate race against the
setting sun.
Romanticism in this sense must be, one imagines, the inevitable
state of a country where the sod is yet to be broken, the forests
hewn down, the wilderness conquered* Energy in such a world
2*7
228 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
must always be outward-moving, dramatic, tense with effort and
struggle. A corresponding life of the soul is evolved, a life focused
on feeling, that is, on emotional movement, whereas in an older
world thought rules, fixed at dead center, unmoving, the source of
serene and classical styles. In the realm of American political life,
also, this spirit early found expression. And in spite of the in
escapable facts of modern industrial organization, it is not too much
to say that libertarianism (the equivalent in this field of the centrif
ugal outward movement of the soul in the esthetic) is still the mood
of American popular life, still the ideal of American thought.
Liberty, freedom, happiness, free speech, no interference from the
next man, these are common American rights, however debased in
practice.
To preserve these rights from corruption has been Stieglitz's en
deavor. Listen to what he has to say, and "free" is the overtone of
almost every word. Free to work, free to be himself, free to live
without selling his soul, these are rough translations of the eloquent
speech which Stieglitz has wielded for years as other men wield
weapons. A worker must be free to do his work; that is said as
one says it is an inalienable right of man. There is no hesitation
here, no conciliation; freedom is the right of men, but especially
of Americans, because their whole history has been based on this
premise. That modern industrialism completely nullifies freedom,
that the fathers of the republic were motivated not only by idealism
but also by economic determinism (plus splendid rhetoric), does
not alter Stieglitz's position. If an idea is true, that is all that
matters. In another society the concepts which control this fidelity
would be other concepts, the direction of his lifelong struggle would
therefore be another direction. But the fundamental philosophic
purity of his endeavor would remain the same; for after this
exegesis of his ideas has been made, a more important conclusion
emerges. To be sure, Stieglitz derives from the American tradition,
he exemplifies the American character. These facts are true enough;
but they are unimportant except in relation to a more basic and
universal truth. In life it is evident that there are forces for evil and
forces for good, that life can only be completely understood in
terms o affirmative and negative values, of creative and destructive
energies. When this is understood, one has no choice except to take
STIEGLITZ AND THE AMERICAN TRADITION 229
his stand on the side of good: certainly this is true of Stieglitz.
Purity, integrity, complete faithfulness to the thing done, these are
the standards by which life is to be judged after this choice.
With Stieglitz the choice must have been made in the cradle.
The uncompromisingness of his external life, the arrowlike sure-
ness of his flight, the unerring taste of his perceptions, his uncanny
foreknowledge of events, these are the best indemnification for
good faith. Such integrity of the spirit one finds in earlier Amer
icans: Emerson, Whitman, Emily Dickinson. One finds it too in
Marin, O'Keefie, Dove. These painters, one believes, are as Amer
ican as Stieglitz, as truly one with the romantic ebb and flow of
American energies. Yet in viewing their work, that work which
Stieglitz so passionately asserts must be permitted to live without
domination from the external world (the world of art dealers, col
lectors, museum directors, critics, and an indifferent public), one
understands again how the American tradition operates, pulsing
through the nation with a stifled sigh of regret for the past, bound
less belief in the future, naive friendliness, exuberant zest for
beauty, how in the last analysis freedom is the right word for the
American heritage.
For the work of these artists (and we write of them and leave out
many others, solely because they most aptly symbolize this Amer
ican sunlight, this American energy) freedom as a way of life is
justified. Here freedom does not produce anarchy or lawless self-
indulgence; it does not lump three diverse lives under one subhead:
homo ammcanus; it does not sacrifice universal or human truth
for an easy nationalistic imprint. It does, however, permit these
splendid workers to live under the American sun, sucking up
strength from the American soil, rooted in the American earth,
beating in time with the American tempo, each achieving that
special and individual happiness for which in the American mind
liberty is the antecedent condition. Liberty, freedom, these words
could not fascinate the mind if they did not correspond to a vital
hunger of the soul The sun falls seductively on these American
acres precisely because they are rich soil for dreams. Stieglitz could
exercise no sway over the imagination, nor could the human ex
emplars of his idea command a compelling loyalty if they did not
speak to a truth deeper seated than the reason can reach.
2 3 o AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLIT2
If one says, then, that romanticism turns outward, its energy
moving from the center of emotion and thought to the circum
ference of expression in art, one means that the individual has
transmuted himself and his experience of life into a symbol, a work
of art, not because he seeks to exhibit himself or to exploit himself,
but because he profoundly believes in the sanctity of life, because
he knows (by the light of this naive and nostalgic American sun)
that the Holy Ghost is every man, and that to deny himself is to
deny Pentecost. Thus one may define romanticism as a tremendous
concentration on feeling, on humane and humanistic values; a
tremendous concern for the individual (not necessarily in the sense
of nineteenth- and twentieth-century humanitarianism) but in the
sense that to the romantic the fate of the individual seems moving
and important; a tremendous hunger for self-realization; nostalgia;
passion; a naive idealism; energy; inventiveness. But when one says
this, one implies also that these values are chiefly important because
they transcend the individual while at the same time depending on
the individual for that incarnation which will give them tangible
life.
It is this being more than human yet always human that makes
Stieglitz profoundly significant for America, this distillation of
American romanticism till by concentration even nostalgia becomes
a major emotion. With Marin and O'Keeffe and Dove the same
raising of emotion to the nth degree takes place. One can love
nature and still be fighting beside the fallen Lucifer; but one can
not love nature as Marin loves it and be anywhere except on the side
of the Everlasting Yea. One can create perfect symbols for one's
perception of life and still be only a minor poet or a little master;
but one cannot burn with the incandescence of the burning bush,
as O'Keejffe burns, and not push this highly personal and romantic
art over into that region where all great art resides, whether
romantic or classical One may play with theories or juggle the
external aspects of the world as some people toy with phrases, and
the result is scarcely important art; but one cannot so tenderly and
so humorously yet withal so mystically experience the iixforming
spirit of the world, as Dove does, without bestowing on his creation
new and profound meaning.
Affirmation is a favorite word of StiegHtz's. There is a very good
STIEGLITZ AND THE AMERICAN TRADITION 231
reason for this: to make an act o faith is a spiritual necessity of
the American character. This compulsion drove John Brown to
bleeding Kansas, to the gallows. Faith is the motive power for these
painters' lives; the resultant acts are to be understood as acts of
faith in the ultimate sense of
Faith is a fine invention
For gentlemen who see;
But microscopes are prudent
In an emergency!
Prudence, caution, calculation of personal advantage, do not enter
into this equation, nor do they indeed enter into the romantic Amer
ican character generally. Certainly Emily Dickinson did not live
with her eye glued to a microscope; rather her sight was always
fixed on an inner revelation, as is the vision of these present-day
inheritors of the American tradition.
This revelation comes back to spiritual terms. Honest work,
honest craftsmanship, these are ideals Stieglitz has exemplified in
his own work, as pure creations as the twentieth century has pro
duced; they are ideals, too, which he has sought to cherish wherever
he has found them in the world: witness those early exhibitions
of Cezanne and Picasso and Matisse at 291, the Marin retrospective
exhibition of 1933, the O'Keeffe retrospective exhibition of 1934.
Of these ideals we must say that they represent in art that condition
of purity and immaculateness for which the human soul desperately
longs and that to speak of honest work, > honest craftsmanship, is
to imply this spiritual passion for perfection. And indeed Stieglitz
would not create the impression of a prophet bewildered because his
revelation is not wanted by the world did he not combine in his
own nature these two strains of the American character, this
fanatical and rhetorical conviction that freedom is the right of
man. and this desperate need for perfectness. American history's
long and weary list of self-betrayals springs from this naive faith,
so integral in the national character. And that Stieglitz's life pre
sents, in so many respects, the parable of the prophet without honor
in his own country must be ascribed to the fact that this belief
(almost like Rousseau's) in the perfectibility of mankind is deeply
2 3 a AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
i unconsciously ingrained in him as the heir o the American
tradition.
There are those who will say that romanticism as a philosophy
of art has run its course, that the last waning energy o the Renais
sance has spent itself, and that if, indeed, romanticism is the banner
under which Ajnerica has marched in the past, it can do so no
longer and live. To be sure, in great societies of the past, the
emphasis of art has been on the group rather than on the isolated
individual. To this Stieglitz will assent; he too conceives of the
artist (and this word accurately should be "worker") as an organic
part of society. The tragedy of Stieglitz and the opportunity o
Stieglitz has been that he has lived in an age when the artist
cannot be an organic part of society because society itself is not
organic. Thus Stieglitz and his "group" may be thought o (from
a somewhat artificially Olympian and detached point of view) as
survivors of a shipwreck, clinging to battered spars, struggling to
resist the waves, yet somehow rescuing that precious spark of life
which we call art. That art has been colored and conditioned by
the disintegrating world which gave it birth; that art, however, is
by no means itself disintegrating. As romanticism can rise superior
to its own intellectual flaws, if endowed with sufficient earnestness
of purpose and intensity of emotion, so art can achieve an existence
independent of the crippling circumstances and the handicaps
which surround it. Of that independent and free existence, as the
symbol of the American tradition, more than any creative worker
or critic of our times, Stieglitz has been the champion.
ELIZABETH MCCAXJSLAND.
II. THE MAN AND THE PLACE
Q
i. THE MAN AND THE PLACE
;JITE A FEW YEARS AGO say twenty-five
here got to be a place.
This place was made by the locating there of a man
and a small group of kindred spirits who gathered about him.
The place grew the place shifted for
when the door was closed the place was where this man was.
This statement will have to be altered juggled or built upon
for the man is quite apt to say
"You don't get it!'
Let's see This place shifted.
Shift is quite a word a here there everywhere sort of word.
Shift is something that cannot be tied cannot be pigeonholed.
It jumps it bounds it glides
it SHIFTS
it must have freedom.
In defense
upon coming upon the unclean the corrupt the petty it shifts.
In offense
upon coming upon these things it efforts to shift them aside
that is if the right party gets ahold of the shift.
So you have here an intangible word a spirit word.
This spirit place too\ form cared for and nourished by this man.
234 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
This spirit had to be fought for offensively and defensively
for this spirit had its reason for existence
from there being surrounding opposing spirits.
Ever since life started a battle ground existed
the battle ground of the spirits of light and those of darkness.
To which band does one belong no one %nowsone only feels.
This much common horse sense tells us
both sides- claim us in part.
What's one to do? How's one to tell?
Well if you glance along the top fence rail
you won't see the powers of evil astraddle the rail
they're too positive.
What's one to do how's one to tell
No You do
And the doers haven't time to straddle fence rails,
It seems those who do that worth the doing
are possessed of good eyes alive eyes warm eyes
it seems they radiate a fire within outward.
The places they inhabit have a light burning
a light seen from near and far by those who need this light
and this light sometimes dim sometimes brilliant never out
A place that is never locked for those who can produce a
A place that is never locked to anyone
anyone can enter and wal^ about
but if one got nothing then the Inner remained closed
they hadn't the
To realize such a place
a very tangible intangible place was and is this man's dream.
How much realized. Well this man being human
wooing and being associated with wording humans
THE MAN ANT> THE PLACE 235
Those round about and many there are
have sensed that things had happened that things were happen
ing
that wor\ had been done and was being done
that the way had been lighted up
that cheer had been given to many to carry on
that the place has carried on with the conviction that
the place does exist.
And as to whether or not everything there done
was the best possible doing
whether or not mistakes were made
whether or not those who were identified tvith the place were the
better
whether or not the better wor\ tvas shown or the showers the better
or as to whether more or less could have been done
All this answers nothing.
It's this
did one get had many gotten of their desires
a portion of these desires in this place
where there tvas a lacking elsewhere.
lEvcn without their 'knowing it.
If so
the man of the place -Alfred Stieglitz- hasn't just dreamed .a place.
That such a place exists to the extent that a certain human
or certain humans can realize an existence. . . .
JOHN MARIN.
236 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
2. 291-AND THE BRASS BOWL
THE ENTRANCE o Seumas O'Sheel, the then young Irish poet, into
my friendship's circle, O'Sheel full of fire for the Irish revolution of
the time, all for going to Ireland and becoming as he said a real
Irishman and not a Christopher Street one, gave shape to the course
of my whole life.
O'Sheel said, do you know Alfred Stieglitz he has a little gallery
at 291 Fifth Avenuehe might be interested let's go up and see
him, and we went up the next morning.
291 Fifth Avenue was an old brownstone house of the "elegant"
period, and had been left like so many of its kind to fate and
circumstance, and had been taken over by various kinds of business
enterprises.
At the foot of the iron staircase leading to the upper floors of 291
was a small showcase with a photograph in it, the name "PHOTO-
SECESSION" and a gold disk between the words. The photograph
was of a great celebrity, I don't remember now whether it was of
Maeterlinck, of D.use, of Rodin; one of them it certainly was, but
it was a photograph made to look like and to have the quality of
a painting, and that was the fashion of that epoch, as we have since
too well learned, the trend being now of course toward "pure"
photography and nothing but, the presiding genius of which is still
Alfred Stieglitz, who even at his advanced age holds the field to
himself, and who certainly has not been excelled by anyone.
O'Sheel ushered me eventually into a small room on the top floor
of that building that opened out from the elevator, it too a tiny
affair, allowing never more than three or four to ascend at one
time.
A shelf followed round the walls of this room, and below were
curtains of dark green burlap, behind which many mysteries were
hidden, things having to do with the progress of photography in
those days.
In the center of this small room was a square platform, also hung
with burlap, and in the center of this was a huge brass bowl
I didn't know the meaning o brass bowls any more than I do
now, but I suspect it was a late reflex from the recently departed
THE MAN AND THE PLACE 237
eighteen-nineties, and the spirit o James McNeill Whistler seemed
to come up out of this bowl like a singular wraith. The bowl, as I
say, meant nothing much to me, as the paintings of Whistler never
meant much of anything, though I learned later to enjoy the real
istic etchings of the Thames series, these meaning more than the
whispery effects of the Venice ones.
I was eventually presented to the presiding spirit of this unusual
place, namely Alfred Sticglitz with his appearance of much culti
vated experience in many things of the world, and of some of them
in particular.
Since a photographer never had to fulfill the idea of conventional
appearances as the artist and poet are supposed to have done, the
photographer could always look like a human being, and therefore
Alfred Stieglitz looked like a very human being, and it was through
this and this alone that he made his indelible impression upon me.
Under the nimbus o voluminous gray hair there was a warm
light and a fair understanding of all things, and anyone who entered
this special place, entered it to be understood, if that was in any
way allowed, and the special condition for this was the sincerity of
the visitor himself.
I am certain that I never confused the presiding spirit of this
place, for I had no talents for such things, so I was taken literally
on my face value, and I had some sort of an impressing face, for
all that was in me was on its surface trying to find a basis of
unification with the outside and what was and still is earnestly
under.
I was taken in therefore to the meaning of this place, and O'Sheel
said to Stieglitz that I had come down from Maine with a set of
paintings seen by no one outside of the brothers Prendergast,
Glackens, and Davies, upon which these men had set some sort
of artistic approval.
Stieglitz, about whom there was a deal of glamour without trace
of esthetic fakery, o which there was a great deal at that time,
remarked that if I wanted to send the pictures there, he would look
at them.
A morning in this room with the brass bowl was revealing, for a
smart array of stylish personages appeared and stood about, for
there was no place to sit except on the edges of the brass bowl and
238 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
few there were who felt courage enough to disturb this very awe
some symbol, so they mostly stood, and the more nervous stood
first on one foot and then the other.
I was, of course, impressed by the people, for I had never seen
quite so many stylish ones. I soon learned also that many of them
could be seen on Fifth Avenue of a morning, for it was the fashion
to walk and be seen walking then, and if you wished to learn who
was who, and to see the casual international face, you walked too,
and the walking seemed to lead, curiously enough, to this small
and, of itself, not too interesting room. Certainly it was not the
room, but what went on in it that mattered, just as a stage feels so
empty when the play is absent. The room was, however, full when
the little shows were centered in it. So much seemed to be hap'
pening.
Stieglitz said to me, the pictures having arrived, if you will leave
them a few days we can then tell you what we think of them
come in three or four days later, and we will then know. This was
done, and the remark then was, I don't know any more what I
think of these pictures than I did at first, but if you would like
it we will give you an exhibition, and you can have it in two weeks
from now. I have no money and no frames, I said. We will supply
the frames, was the reply, and the exhibition was far more speedily
realized than I could have hoped for, and was my initiation into
over twenty years of most remarkable experience, I certainly having
the right to call it unique, for here was one man who believed in
another man over a space of more than twenty years, and the matter
of sincerity was never questioned on either side*
The ensuing weeks were employed sensing this new place, a
place which has maintained its physical and spiritual existence for
more than forty years, and has been a remarkable, surely a remark
able factor in American art experience.
A sort o hallway between die small room and a large room at
the rear was also used for exhibition, and in the rear room all the
private talking seemed to be done, and it took me a time to find
my place in this room, for it was strewn with fragments of fabrics
and wall papers which I learned were the working paraphernalia
of the decorating establishment o Stephen B* Lawrence, who had
always to rummage around for his materials among a lot of artists,
THE MAN AND THE PLACE 239
who sat around the drum stove which warmed all of them from
the winter's chill.
There was likewise a Parisian tone pervading this place.
We began to hear names like Matisse, Picasso, Cezanne, Rous
seau, and Manolo, this last name never heard before, and still none
too well known outside immediate circles, and it was from all this
fresh influx that I personally was to receive new ideas and new
education.
There was life in all these new things, there was excitement, there
were healthy revolt, investigation, discovery, and an utterly new
world opened out of it all. A new enchantment and satisfaction was
to come.
There was, therefore, intense excitement of a visual character in
this little room from day to day, and the world flocked in to see
what it was all about, to hear a possible explanation of it from
someone, or to be intellectually and emotionally dumfounded. Cer
tainly some were to be harassed and annoyed.
The critics came and had begun to laugh and deride.
The brass bowl was being filled with other reverberations, far
less whispery than the previous ones, and it was not so long after
that the brass bowl disappeared entirely and with it the early soft
nesses of Marin's water colors, for he too had been overcome
indeed, Marin was among the first in this country to be affected by
the new harmonic and the new dissonances.
Drawings and small paintings by Matisse made their first appear*
ance in New York in this room. Matisse's sculpture appeared like
wise, also the smaller and, as I recall, only water color pictures of
Cezanne, then also the abstractions of Picasso, and the small but
very forceful sculptures of Manolo.
It must have been more or less at this juncture that Stieglitz
recalled to me, only the other day, my pointing to a Picasso abstrac
tion and saying, this is the way it will go from now on, only an
instinctive reaction certainly.
Max Weber had returned with a full understanding of the prin
ciples of Cezanne and of cubism. I was ushered into this group
as a kind of new hope, with aa application of impressionism im
bibed through Segaatinl Somewhere about this time or later, Mrs.
Mary Knoblauch appeared as an old friend of Gertrude Stein, with
240 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
a heap of manuscript saying, I don't understand anything of all
this, I wish someone would look at it and see if he or she can and
some of the now well known portraits of Gertrude's such as "One,
One, One" of Picasso were printed in Camera Wor\.
One other day a young lady walked in with a roll of charcoal
drawings of a friend of hers who was, she said, teaching drawing
in the schools of Texas, this friend having been a pupil of Arthur
Dow at Columbia. There was no name on these drawings, and
there has never been a name on .any of the paintings that have
followed, for this artist believes also, as I do, that if there is any
personal quality, that in itself will be signature enough, and we
have seen a sequence of unsigned pictures over a given space of
years permeated with an almost violent purity of spirit. The name
of Georgia O'Keeffe was spoken eventually, and soon learned by
all of us. It was some time after that this woman herself appeared
in our midst, who, according to some persistent voices, has become
the leading woman painter perhaps of the world, full of utterly
embedded femininity.
There was much talk pro and con about my pictures in this little
room, mostly con, I seem to remember, with the dissensions coming
largely from the Parisian element. I had no voice in the matter,
for I was not a talking person. I only knew I had had some kind
of definite experience with nature, the nature of my own native
land. I could only tell at what I had been looking and from whom
my release had come. Steichen's remark to Stieglitz then was, I
don't see, Stieglitz, what you see in those pictures, why you bother
about them or him, there is nothing there.
Stieglitz replied, I don't think so, though you may be right I
don't think so something makes me think something is happening.
New values, as I have said before, have been established, and with
the old ones the brass bowl and all that went with it disappeared
with a morning wind.
291 had to become a thing of the past, physically speaking, for
the building was to be torn down. It was without doubt Mitchell
Kennerley who later made it possible for Stieglitz to take room
303 in the Andersoa Galleries building* The little room down
town had brought the best there was to light in the world of
photography. The whole impetus and interest then seemed to go
THE MAN AND THE PLACE 241
over to painting and the development of what appeared to be some
new American personalities.
Mr. Thomas Craven, in his latest book, would have the world
now believe that Mr. Stieglitz has done more evil than good, and
that some of us esthetic "snobs" have "gone to the dogs" because of
our interest in eclectic notions. We are now placed among the snobs,
those awful people, and we are expected to take an interest in the
true meaning of art which is "social," as if art was ever meant to be
anything else when properly understood, there being no such thing
as unsocial art, art being distinctly for anybody who cares to be
interested in it, and how really happy must those people be who
do not care for it at all, after all the quibbling. Quibbling must,
however, be left to the quibblers Stieglitz will tell you, and he has
said it a thousand times, that the 291 idea was never meant to be
anything but an experiment, "laboratory" is his favorite word; a
laboratory where several individuals have been allowed to display
their virtues and their defects.
Despite whatever derogatory criticism, and it is the pet mania of
certain cynics to destroy annually American values to the American
people, this little harmless room of 291 will never be shaken out
of its significances. It meant well then, and it means well today.
It did a work that was never done before, and one that is not
likely to be done again, for the same degree of integrity and faith
in one person will not be so readily found. All that one group
was able to do was done by the spirit of 291, for that group was
never but a single spirit and a single voice. It was never allowed to
be broken in upon by a touch of hypocrisy, and the thing that
happened was found to be a high and strictly pure American value,
and an American contribution to American cultivation. The pur
pose of Alfred Stieglitz and the famous little room 291 through
which I was permitted to enter and pass onward to a given
realization which I am still engaged in completing, is as genuine
today as it was twenty-five years ago, when we all entered into its
trust and were given credence,
If this room ceases to mean anything any longer to an outer and
different world, it is because this world is essentially indifferent to
the kind of thing it meant and still means.
Something has been done that will never be denied its rightful
242 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
heritage, which can be no more or less than the admiration of the
few who understand and who have admiration and respect to offer*
This litde room has become to some of us, then, and it is not too
much to say, an enormous room enormous, I say again, if only
because it let a few personalities develop in the way they were
believed in, and find the way to develop of themselves.
MARSDEN HARTLEY.
THE MAN AND THE PLACE 243
3. A DIFFERENT ONE
Once upon a time the same ones could always ta\e the same
things to the same places and get the same welcome because the
things were the same.
There never was any difference. Any one with any eye could
see that.
Even some of those same ones could see that, but they %ept on
in the same way.
Then there was Stieglitz who at the right time and the right
spot threw the wrench.
So by now we have more up-to-now machinery. At least it is
not always the same.
There was a great necessity for a live one because there were
so many undertakers, and they- all made their livings from the dead
ones.
The Gentlemen of the Juries would go to Stieglitz' s exhibitions
and get themselves tal\ed to by an honest man which they never
li\ed any more than they did the paintings.
But it put some of them onto themselves and it put others onto
them, so they had to paint modern faces on the bac\s of their
heads, but the knowing ones %new that the undertakers' faces were
on the other side so they couldn't go in places where there were
mirrors*
And they had to wear snap ties, and all together it was pretty
difficult.
And everyone laughed at the wrong moment.
And they forgot to bring their chec\-boo\.
So the same ones bought new colors and tried to paint up their
spirits but they couldn't reach them they were too far down.
There was an esthetic revolution going on and they didn't \now
it, and Stieglitz ^new it all the time.
And crowds of people came to hear him talking about the whole
condition and they couldn't go bac\ and listen to the same ones
talking of their condition.
So the same ones banded together and tried to ma\e the whole
condition their condition.
244 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
But they couldn't agree because all of them were thinking of
their condition, and conditions had changed.
I always hear someone talking of the whole condition.
Someone I always li\e to hear talking.
Who is always saying something, something that has life rather
than value.
It is li\e the voice of a fine old firm that made fine instruments
for the love of their quality.
It is a great voice.
This voice will always be \nown.
Everyone who has %nown this voice \nows that it will be, I mean
the knowing ones.
This voice is the thing that has changed this America of ours.
Made something of hope in it.
It has quality.
I have the privilege of ^nowing the owner of this voice, and /
wouldn't trade it for anything.
I mean that I \now Stieglitz, impersonal as any human being so
charged with spirit can be.
And I know that he loves an idea well enough to give his life to
that idea all day long every day.
He loves race horses and does not bet, he is that way about
everything.
I li\e his being a thorn in the crown of the commonplace. And
I have always been glad to know him more than any other man.
This man is the greatest photographer, and he has made photog*
raphy an art.
I have heard O'Keeffe say, "Dove, he's got us beaten!*
There was never any compromise in the introduction of ideas,
which had been introduced one after the other for the first time
in America.
A fine old head with a spirit that can ma\e circles around the
younger ones through sheer spiritual energy.
His ears appear as though the roots of his feelings have grown
out into the air in the form of hair for more room to breathe.
I have seen some of his feelings, blac^ and white as his photo*
graphs, with the same subtle meaning that perhaps even beautifal
color could never answer.
THE MAN AND THE PLACE ^45
Stieglitz tvas trying to let people see that photography was an
art, and at the same time shouting Picasso who tvas trying to ma\e
his art "more photographic''
When asJ^ed what Stieglitz means to me as an artist, I answer:
everything.
Because 1 value his opinion as one who has always I^nown-
I do not thinly 1 could have existed as a painter without that
super-encouragement and the battle he has -fought day by day for
twenty-five years.
He is without a doubt the one tvho has done the most -for art in
America.
ARTHUR G. DOVE.
246 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
#. LIGHTHOUSES AND FOG
For no reason, perhaps a very good reason, after all; as I start
to write this, / have been thinking, when really not thinking, of
lighthouses and fog.
Lighthouses and fog a lighthouse and many fogs. There really
are not many lighthouses, and fogs seem to be always rolling in
from most distinguished shores and seas.
"Lighthouses are fixed. Sometimes they seem to have moved but
they really haven't. Lights in lighthouses sometimes move but they
do not move as lights in a political street parade move. Lights in
lighthouses sometimes winJ^, and I've seen them myself twinkle.
"But you said you were writing about Stie glitz "
"Well, I am writing about Stie glitz here, this is what I have
been doing writing about Stieglitzl"
CHARLES DEMUTH.
THE MAN AND THE PLACE 247
5. A PORTRAIT
THE PERSONALITY o Alfred Stieglitz has been captivating and
perplexing me a long time. I observed the man, his life, his work.
I knew that such extraordinary Force should be set down in
writing, recorded, but never dared to; feeling it was altogether too
big a thing, too complex and varied a nature, made up of so many
polarities that would be hard to reconcile in one portrait. But as
Stieglitz is growing older and ever more subtle and abstract, soon
to extend altogether beyond my capacity as a writer, I will make
my first attempt now. To paint his portrait full length properly
against the background of these times it would require a master. I
can hope to put together only a few simple paragraphs here, a pen
portrait of this complex man in a single outline.
What is so remarkable about Stieglitz? In a word, it is the fact
that what are two extremes abide in one individual: the active and
the contemplative man. The range thus is vast. You cannot at a
bound pass from one to the other. You traverse thereby space and
time, and along the way lies all life. So authentic an artist as Stieg
litz the photographer and so complete a man of the world flourish
ing side by side in one man command very large quarters indeed
for the soul to dwell in in peace.
But if there is any jostling going on within, who knows of it?
In one room, on exquisite walls, Stieglitz's exquisite presentation of
the ecstatic water colors of Marin, or O'Keeffe's austere passion; in
another in a little cubbyhole, the photographer's dark room Stieg-
litz's own lyrics of the sky coming into his exacting view. And
think of this artist to whom the thought of money is repellent as an
equivalent for Ms work, talking money freely, almost insensitively
matter of fact, to the buyer of the painter's pictures as well as to
those who don't buy.
Stieglitz skillfully dissociates the art from the man. Art is
invaluable but does not feed the man, who must live. In the next
turn of the sentence the man and his work are interchangeable:
the picture is a Marin. Then finally the picture is nothing, that is,
not an emotional reflex but a symbol, nor even a symbol, merely
248 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
an index to a man, who, standing somewhere in the midst of facts,
paints, suffers, dreams.
Just why does Stieglitz talk so much? Is it in order to teach or
to learn or to right some wrong? All of these, but incidentally he is
practising an art, the art of the spoken word. Passing through the
stages of soliloquy meditating aloud and dialogue conversation
his talk has entered the phase of dramatic narrative. Where once
he needed the interlocutor's "cue," he now is content with his mere
presence. And there unfolds itself a story of great power. And the
story is this same man Stieglitz unfolding into a drama. A man
born in America with the demon within that is art. Therein lies
much conflict. And that demon has two heads and one body. One
head looks to the past, the other to the future, and the body, I
hardly need say, is the present. The creative demon and in the
American scene what a spectacle, what drama!
And Stieglitz, a master of talk, with the unsought and bare
word, without gesture, without pauses or poses, but voluminously,
portrays, judges, synthesizes these times we live in, this American
scene of our struggles. One is overawed by the weight of his
pronouncements; one hangs on his periods until he has completed
them, There is no stray thought but will be threaded into the
scheme of the whole woof. Your one regret is you cannot hold so
much. But that does not worry Stieglitz. With Cezanne, he leaves
his pictures out in the field where he painted them. However, it is
not ever lost, this talk like living seed. It insinuates itself into the
soil of America in the most impalpable way.
This rich, copious talk, so sure, so bold, so human- what is its
source? What feeds it? What impels it? Above all I would say:
Faith. He lashes out at American sentimentality and hardness, out
of faith in America. He leaves so much collected art and data out
of faith in the coming men of America. He stands guard over the
artists of his choice from their veriest beginnings through all their
deviations and gropings. What is it but faith in creative men?
And Stieglitz does not misplace his faith* He knows men. He
goes to art by way of the living man, where it is possible* The
art may be in a fallow period, in a stage of transition or at its begin
ning. Not so the man. The man is the soul of the man a fixed
THE MAN AND THE PLACE 249
star. He searches him out to the core, to the white glow, where the
soul sits rocking on the rhythms of its own music.
Only a prophet would venture to tell from the first tentative
efforts an artist's later work, the new garb of acquired rules cover
ing over the natural laws of body and soul. But the character of
the man, of every man, stands out from the very first and perhaps
more clearly so at first naked as daylight, in the full view of those
who can see. Only a cataclysm may make a man over. But a man
will surely make over his first pictures. All of his life the artist
is re-forming his medium, just so it would capture and hold
what? no more than that true vision of self or that sure aware
ness of this or that man, woman, or thing.
To the degree that Stieglitz knew men, did he also know him
self. He recognized himself very early as just such a man as he
later sought round about him. He knew himself, as Adam knew
himself, alone and sad, in this Paradise of America. The country
had to be sifted and sifted again for what it might yield of the
finer spirits among whom to dwell and work. The old men and those
grown lazy stayed away. Anyway, they could not have gone through
the holes in the sieve that Stieglitz held, any more than the camel
long ago could pass through the eye of the needle. Only spirited and
visionary young men came. Their coming to Stieglitz was in itself a
test of their probity. There was no splendid gallery to draw them, no
patrons, no sinecures. They came through an urge within them. It
was an art movement in America that has hardly yet begun to be
evaluated. And Stieglitz was its First and Chief Mover.
The forces that urge a man on do not exist apart from the man.
They shine through in a transfigured way, it is true, but they show
through that man only. The forces of vitality, love, and faith,
spring from that man. They run over into a manifest physiognomy.
They run over into manifest activities. With the artist they run over
into the symbols at his command. These are the various ways of
knowing a man: from his mask, from his deeds, from the visions
he projects. In a simple man, his various ways of manifesting him
self are not at variance. Not quite so, Stieglitz, All of Stieglitz does
not hover on the surface. And there is so much art and imagination
in his activities outside of his art that they body forth still another
Stieglitz.
250 AMERICA AND ALFRED STTEGLITZ
The physiognomy of Stieglitz shows purest, however, in his
photographs, the medium in which he is a master. His ideal of
clear statement he could bring about best here. But these photo
graphs are not statements only, by which are meant primarily states
of the mind; they are states of a soul. No prose enters here. No
harshness of voice, but regrettably also they lack that arching of the
upper lip, their concept is Apollonian. Stieglitz escapes here to
breathe his rarest atmosphere.
As a diver for pearls comes up to breathe the common air again,
so Stieglitz comes back into the tumultuous life he obviously loves
too. Many an artist knows as well as Stieglitz the void about him
which he would so want to encompass about with walls which
should retain his music and not let it disperse and mix with the
volatile air and so be lost. I mean, they are aware that they must
know and love men and women, commune and suffer with them
but somehow they go on living apart, in their shell, and hope to
be gods, when they do not dare to be human.
But, though Stieglitz does not carry the Dionysian clatter into
the picture, yet he distills life into his art. And a lot of life, and a
lot of love too! And it is a fallacy to say that he holds the subject
matter as an inferior element. He does not love those heads he
portrays? Those skies with sun and clouds? The skyscrapers of
New York? Does he employ them only for the "pull and push" of
their lines? that which is the physics of a picture? Away beyond
that reaches out the symbolic or spiritual value of the subject
matter, which Stieglitz, rooting as he does in life, certainly cannot
despise. There is an affinity between the matter and the master.
But as his abundant matter cannot be absorbed into his meticu
lous and exquisite prints the Apollonian concept discriminating
against much of it he turns the residue into the stuff of his talk,
of which I have already given a glimpse. And so this is another
phase of his creative physiognomy.
But for all the fascination of Stieglitz's speech, what would it be
but for the body of his talk? Sticglitz's idiom is not brilliant, his
phrases in themselves not arresting. His style of speech is casual.
One does not know by what art he entrains his listeners. And
although one does not at once see the purport of Stieglitz's talk as
it begins, one feels, nevertheless, that something of great moment
THE MAN AND THE PLACE 251
Is steadily unfolding. The purport finally becomes clear. It is, to
evolve some principle of art, of man, of justice, from his own high
plane. The mass of knowledge he has drawn from everywhere, and
his own factual experiences inform his talk, though they never
weigh it down. He thereby does not formulate any principles,
though you feel them forever there. High principles a sense of art
that is religious. Death being as sleep. A sense of responsibility that
is heroic. What has been begun is Fate. The perfect thing that is
even a blade of grass.
Now those principles are not the rare playthings of the mind
of a recluse that lives in some high inaccessible fastness. They are
alive at every point, and Stieglitz brings them home to us again
and again by his own acts. He is of the company of the great
teachers who teach by their own example, by the side of whom
good and true things take on an added luster, and ugly and selfish
things an added reproach. These men raise the standard of values
by their very life. Act upon act they build their life, like a house, in
the full view of men. From the ground plan to the finished thing,
it is of one irresistible purpose, as if a master mind made it
although as many contrarieties have gone into its composition as
disrupts many an ideal scheme: the heart and the curious mind,
outer influences and the tides and times.
Stieglitz has made up his life of his acts, acts as tangible as days,
as many and as easy to record. Acts mostly of his own initiative,
propelled by a flash of intuition acts of faith. And acts reasoned
out and engineered acts of will. Acts of apparently small account
and acts of great moment all launched with the same care and
love, and directed knowingly or unknowingly toward that far-
reaching end The Perfect Life.
As in his photographs and in his talk, so also in his activities,
there are no loose ends. It will all be taken care of in due time. The
provident eye will not weaken until he sees it through, and the
hand will not falter until everything is in its place.
Alfred Stieglitz must know, as well as most of us do, that there
is no one else as venturesome and right, as unselfish and just, and
as complex a personality as himself, in all the art life of this land
at this time, or hitherto.
JENNINQS
252 AMERICA AND ALFRED STIEGLITZ
6. AN AMERICAN EXPERIENCE
STIEGLITZ BEGAN for one person with Marin.
Marin was what was being taken in by a body inclined dervishly-
whirling because of eyes impelled to lightning-rapid adjustments
along the eight walls of short-hand performances constituting the
great water-colorist's first encompassing show.
What was being taken in was American landscape in all its leap
ing drama from universal storm menace out of heavy sea floor to
that lightest cloud-capering which only American landscape seems
foolish enough to indulge in* (And which, "stooping so high,"
without a doubt tickles the taproot of the country's peculiar humor
into flinging out beyond its capacious bole of belly-shaking gusti-
ness the very last tenderest laughing-leaf.)
One's head was not so much in clouds as one's body, stanch
enough on American earth, went fox-and-goose chasing in Amer
ican air with its prankish jumps from heavy to light, wet to dry, hot to
cold; in American Atlantic pushing ship to air's yea and nay (and to
an astute artist's advantage) ; in American vegetation achieved to its
precise size shape texture tone out of just this earth air water.
Sporty landscape, that, poking people too unexpectedly, too hard
in the ribs, perhaps; requiring too hasty, too great adjustments of
breath intake, blood flow: put down by a man who could take in
to the last vibration and deliver to the last quippish delight quick
small large slow contrasts.
One stabilized to fondest element-intimacy through long heap
ing up from earliest impressions of warm sun on soft hair, white
snow softness against hard windowpane opaqueness, lustful grit
of earth scooped out of wettish spring furrows: That one was
boisterously caught up, tossed about, wanted to step hard, push,
weep, laugh, so rapidly changeful the impact from performance to
performance of LIGHT as living in its mysterious pl 
