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In Focus: Alfred Stieglitz. - book reviews
Art Journal, Summer, 1996 by Debra Bricker Balken
John Szarkowski notes in his introductory essay to Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George that "a million words have been written about Alfred Stieglitz, but it has proven difficult to find the right ones" (p. 9). This seems an elusive justification for adding to the mass of books, articles, and exhibition catalogues that exist on Stieglitz's life and work. Stieglitz (1864-1946) is not quite the sly, evasive figure that Szarkowski makes him out to be. While much has been made of his self-fashioning, his preoccupation with his place in history, and his maniacal efforts to project his monumental ego or, American art, he can and has been pinned down with considerable psychological and historical accuracy in earlier assessments. Moreover, it seems that every aspect of his erratic photographic career by now has been treated in depth. Why the ongoing spate of publications on this thoroughly situated and canonical figure?
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Szarkowski's angle, to treat the body of photographs produced at Stieglitz's summer house in Lake George from 1915 through 1936, purports to reveal the "new taste for factuality" (p. 17) that registered in Stieglitz's work after World War I. While formal evidence of Stieglitz's interest in purging his work of an earlier pictorialist aesthetic exists prior to his involvement with Georgia O'Keeffe in 1917, the move to continue to make more "factual" photographs has traditionally been construed as entwined in this pivotal relationship. On this well-rehearsed issue Szarkowski is reserved and cautionary, stating that "the rejuvenation of Stieglitz that attended the discovery and exploration of this great passionate love affair may have contributed to his artistic energy during the following years" (pp. 22-23). O'Keeffe was not only Stieglitz's most photographed subject, but his muse, an obsession sustained until his death in 1946. His own description of O'Keeffe in 1917 clearly defines the linkages between his life and art: "I want her to live - I never wanted anything as much as that. She is the spirit of '291' - not I."(1) It would appear from this declaration that the environs and ease of life at Lake George were not the only determinants that resulted in the redirection of his work.
While Szarkowski's project gathers together imagery hitherto unconsidered as a totality - a minor curatorial accomplishment - his analysis remains frustratingly tame, compounding rather than clarifying the pervasive mythology on Stieglitz. Richard Whelan's book, Alfred Stieglitz: A Biography, admittedly a different genre of writing from the exhibition catalogue, is by contrast impressively researched and draws on reams of rich archival information that produces a more objective and measured view of this complex figure. Whelan chronicles Stieglitz's life in minute detail. He meticulously documents the photographer's childhood years in Hoboken, New Jersey, and New York, through a five-year family sojourn in Germany, to his preoccupation with the cause of pictorial photography and eventually the avant-garde in America.
Along the way Whelan weaves in every extant scrap of information that can account for Stieglitz's increasing self-absorption and grandiosity. We are even told, for example, that "as for his sexual fantasies, we know that he was deeply aroused by Peter Paul Rubens's great portrait of his voluptuous wife Helene Fourment, nude except for a fur wrap, which he saw in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna in 1882" (p. 66). While it might be more instructive to hear from Stieglitz directly on his erotic feelings, this claim is undocumented in Whelan's book. Nevertheless, the attempt to demystify a previously constructed heroic figure is applaudable, although frequently, credible evidence is scant.
For the most part, Whelan deftly balances firsthand descriptions of Stieglitz that range from the laudatory to the vituperative. Within this spectrum of reactions a sense of Stieglitz's alternatively vainglorious and insecure nature emerges. Describing his 1922 staging of an exhibition of O'Keeffe's work at the Anderson Galleries, Whelan notes that Sherwood Anderson was struck by how Stieglitz "so patiently worked with the stupid people who came in" to view O'Keeffe's work (p. 438). Whereas Maynard Dixon, a western artist and the husband of Dorothea Lange, was less taken by Stieglitz's tolerance and importance: "Listening to Stieglitz expatiate. Impression of cleverness and futility; hot-house atmosphere. . . . Stale-air existence. Glad to get away" (p. 439).
But for all the commendable marshaling of data, Whelan's biography is disappointingly devoid of any larger critical examination. Certainly some deeper cultural or psychological conclusion could be drawn from the fascinating juxtapositions of quotes that run through the book. Whelan's book is the most thorough biography on Stieglitz to emerge to date, but Benita Eisler's more focused take in her O'Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance (New York: Doubleday, 1991) still stands out in my mind as a more adventuresome, probing inquiry.
