As the 20th Century dawned, a new generation of American artists found themselves drawn to a profoundly new form of modernism. Cubism was rapidly becoming entrenched as a cutting edge genre among a new generation of European Modernists. Having already absorbed the lessons of Impressionism and the Ashcan School, many of these young Americans began turning to the new modern art in Europe, the groundbreaking stylistic work of their generational counterparts like Picasso, Braque, Rodin, and Matisse. No figure was more instrumental in promoting this new art in America than Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), a pioneering figure in photography and founder of the renowned Stieglitz Circle that established itself as the leading promoter of European and American modernism in America. Reacting to the developments of this modern era of artistic expression, they adapted their own aesthetic, technique, subject matter and medium to reflect an essentially American form: the vitality of the modern industrial era.
Alfred Stieglitz, a photographer, art dealer and publisher, was an American-born son of German Jewish immigrants. Educated in New York and Germany, he started to dabble in photography as a hobby, but soon became obsessed with its most modern forms, exhibiting and writing on what was then a still unestablished modern medium. After nine years of study and travel, he returned to New York in 1890 with a single goal: the advancement of pictorial photography as an accepted art form equal to fine art, tirelessly promoting modernism in his roles as artist, dealer and publisher.
In 1905, Stieglitz joined with fellow photographer Edward Steichen to open their first gallery: the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in Steichen’s former studio at 291 Fifth Avenue. Initially conceived to promote photography, 291 soon became a pioneering center for modernism in all its forms. Stieglitz, Steichen, American modernist Max Weber, and Mexican painter and writer, Maurius de Zayas tapped their numerous European connections to position 291 as the first American gallery to promote the European avant-garde. A 1908 exhibition featured nude drawings by Auguste Rodin and works by Matisse, and further shows featuring the work of Cezanne (1910) and Pablo Picasso (1911) were intended to initiate America into the new ideas of modern art. By 1912, Stieglitz was so taken with non-photographic art, that he dedicated an entire issue of his publication, Camera Notes to the work of Matisse and Picasso.
The early exhibitions of Modernism didn’t always go smoothly, meeting with significant resistance from critics and the public. But Stieglitz was undaunted and began expanding the roster of young American artists devoted to the style. He formed what came to be known as the Stieglitz Circle with key members being Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Maurer, Steichen, Paul Strand, Weber, and de Zayas, all of whom exhibited at 291 and many in later years at the Intimate Gallery (1925-29) and An American Place (1929-46). With the exception of O’Keeffe, they had all studied in Europe and their work would develop into a revolutionary take on the natural and modern world around them.
In February 1913, Americans were shocked into another new visual experience with the opening of The Armory Show in New York, organized by the Association of American Painters and Sculptors. America’s first major public introduction to the European vanguard, the Armory Show would become a seminal event in the arrival of American Modernism. Though Stieglitz was not directly involved in the preparations, he served as honorary vice-president, lent artwork from his gallery, endorsed the show in the press, and purchased works. Visitors viewed roughly 1,300 works by Europe’s avant-garde including those Stieglitz had already championed as well as Archipenko, Duchamp, Gauguin, Gleizes, Kandinsky, Metzinger, and Picabia. Many of the Americans represented would go on to become major figures in 20th Century art, including George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Hartley, Edward Hopper, George Luks, Marin, and Alfred Maurer.
Though not a member of the Stieglitz Circle, Stuart Davis (1892-1964) was closely aligned with another modernist group in New York, the Whitney Studio Club formed by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the founder of the Whitney Museum. This group tended towards the Ashcan school aesthetic and those that had studied under its leader, Robert Henri focused on the reality of the urban New York landscape - images of ordinary people and common place, everyday life from saloons, to alleyways, to bar and dance halls. Henri’s influence on the young Davis is visible in The Dance from 1912, a gathering of ladies and gentlemen dancing and merrymaking in various stages of decorum. It was one of five works exhibited by the artist at the Armory Show. Perhaps more than any other figure, the 1913 exhibition would have an enormous influence on Davis’ work, pushing it in a completely new direction. Davis himself stated, “The Armory Show was the greatest shock to me—the greatest single influence I have experienced in my work. All my immediately subsequent efforts went toward incorporating Armory Show ideas into my work.”1
Following the Armory Show, Stieglitz focused his efforts on European and American modernism at 291 until its closure in 1917, then focused his efforts almost exclusively on American art through two other iterations of his gallery, the Intimate Gallery (1925–29) and An American Place (1929–46). With connections to some of the leading thinkers and writers of the day like Waldo Frank, Paul Rosenfeld, and William Carlos Williams, this tightly-knit group committed themselves to modern art and forging an authentic American identity through this lens.
In March 1916, Stieglitz assisted in planning and promoting modernism with The Forum exhibition of Modern American Painters at New York’s Anderson Galleries, with over 200 works by 16 American artists including Thomas Hart Benton, Bluemner, Dove, Hartley, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Marin, Maurer, George Of, Man Ray, and William and Marguerite Zorach. Several exhibitions here featured his own photography, including his series of portraits of O’Keeffe and her paintings.
While several other fairs and exhibitions took some of the exclusivity away from Stieglitz’s own gallery endeavors, they successfully set in motion the maturation of modernism in America and also solidified New York’s reputation as the nexus of the modern art world. With the onset of World War I, an influx of European artists to the United States provided ample opportunities for artists to meet, share and absorb modern ideas into their work, and America’s booming industrial cities would provide new fodder and subject matter for visual interpretation. Gradually, exposure to these new forms became more widespread with more and more exhibitions and exposure from other art gallerists and patrons.
In 1916, Stieglitz included Georgia O’Keeffe’s (1887-1986) watercolors for the first time in a group show at 291, followed by a solo shows in 1917 and 1923. The artist became a muse, then Stieglitz’s lover, and they married in 1924 (at John Marin’s home). Stieglitz became a driving force for her career, promoting the initial interpretation of her pictures as erotic and as expressions of female sexuality, though O’Keeffe herself denied this. Having produced over 2000 pictures, many of her works on paper illustrate the repetition of motifs in her oeuvre as a serial practice. The New York Times art critic Roberta Smith stated in her review of the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition Georgia O’Keeffe: To See Takes Time, “Such ‘seriality,’ if you will, was a means by which she pushed her motifs toward abstraction, or explored different materials, primarily charcoal, watercolor and paste.” 2.
O’Keeffe’s experience and love of a surrounding landscape, whether at Stieglitz’s family home at Lake George in New York’s Adirondack region or later at her adopted New Mexico home, inspired her works with found objects from nature and her built environment. Over time and through repetition, she cropped and manipulated color and form, working towards ultimate and sublime abstraction. Flowers initially depicted in their fullness, are reduced to internal petals and swirls of color and form; New Mexico mesas become fully abstracted bands of desert hues, a precursor to color field pictures by Mark Rothko; and earth and river forms seen from the air, inspired by her travels around the world, are reduced to organic lines across largely monochromatic canvases, seen in Blue Black and Grey (1960; Georgia O'Keeffe Museum) illustrating her mastery and efficiency of line and color.
Like O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove (1880-1946) held a spiritual connection to nature and sought to unlock its mystical presence in his paintings. Upon his return from Europe in 1909, where he’d been greatly influenced by the Fauves, Matisse, and later Cubism, he was invited by Stieglitz to submit work to 291’s Younger American Painters 1910 exhibition and later, in 1912 was given his first solo show at the same venue, cementing his primary position as an American avant-garde in Stieglitz’s circle.,/p>
Spending most of his career on the East Coast in New York and Long Island, Dove responded viscerally to nature, its rhythms and light. His work was radical and intuitive pushing the limits of organic abstraction, playing between landscape and abstraction and nature and imagination, resulting in purely nonrepresentational imagery. His unique language would anticipate and influence the Abstract Expressionists in the late 1940s, including Jackson Pollock and Rothko. His work equally captivated his fellow modernists including O’Keeffe who was taken by his work in 1914, admiring its “abstract organic shapes that coalesced into a seductive, undulating, rhythmic pattern.” The feeling was mutual. When Dove viewed the young O’Keeffe’s watercolors for the first time at 291, he said, “This girl… is doing what we fellows are trying to do. I’d rather have one of her watercolors than anything I know.” Dove soon took up the medium and the two were introduced in 1918 by Stieglitz and held a lifelong admiration for one another’s work. O’Keeffe later described Dove as having “an earthy, simple quality that led directly to abstraction. His things are very special. I always wish I’d bought more of them.”
Master watercolorist, John Marin (1870-1953) reacted to both urban and rural locales, illustrating the pulsating and frenetic atmosphere and jutting skyscrapers of Manhattan, as well as the jagged coastline and turbulent seas of Maine. Stieglitz remained an ardent supporter of Marin’s work, holding annual exhibitions of his work from 1909 into the years after World War Two. Though his preferred medium was watercolor, Marin adopted oil in the late 1920s. The dynamic, playful and masterful manipulation of abstraction and realism in both media earned him a retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in 1936. His modern interpretations in technique and spirit were beautifully summarized by the artist himself in 1946, “I’m calling my pictures this year ‘Movements in Paint’ and not movements of boat, sea or sky, because in these new paintings, although I use objects, I am representing paint first of all and not the motif primarily.” 3.
The success of Marin’s work combined with Stieglitz’s fierce championing paid off in 1948 when the prominent modern art critic Clement Greenberg stated, "If it is not beyond doubt that [John] Marin is the greatest living American painter, he certainly has to be taken into account when we ask who is." 4. Not long after, Look magazine surveyed over 60 curators, critics and museum directors to select the ten best painters in America and Marin was declared number one. Upon his death he was hailed for his impact upon the evolution of modern art as well as his outsized influence on the next generation of Abstract Expressionists such as Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
In 1925 Stieglitz organized one of the largest exhibitions of American art to date, titled Alfred Stieglitz Presents Seven Americans. The show included 159 never before seen works by his stable and his own photographs. In the autumn of 1929, Stieglitz then 65 years old, opened what would be his last gallery, An American Place. It was the largest space he’d had to date and included a dark room for his own work. He continued to promote his modernists, especially Dove, Marin, and O’Keeffe for the next 16 years until his death in 1946. O’Keeffe then took control of the gallery and proceeded to promote Stieglitz’s legacy by assembling and donating a ‘key set’ of 1,317 photographs to Washington’s National Gallery of Art, followed by an additional 325 in 1980, of images taken by Stieglitz and herself. Today it comprises the largest collection of Stieglitz’s work in America. After a lifetime of championing equality for his preferred medium, such honorable placement in a revered institution was a fitting tribute and emblematic of the work he achieved throughout his lifetime.
As a passionate and tireless promoter of European and American Modernism in America in all its forms, photography, painting and writing, Alfred Stieglitz occupies a uniquely important position. Dedicating almost 60 years to his ideals and passion, his efforts succeeded in securing modern art and members of the Stieglitz Circle, a vital place as contributors to the cultural fabric of America. One that would affect lasting influence on the next generation of modernists, the Abstract Expressionists.
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Footnotes:
1. J. J. Sweeney, Stuart Davis. Exh. Cat. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1945, pp. 9-10.
2. Roberta Smith, “Georgia O’Keeffe, ‘Modernized’ by MoMA”, The New York Times, art
review, 27 April 2023, https://nyti.ms/3BByP6P.
3. Marin in Oil, Southampton, New York, 1987, p. 55.
4. Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, Massachusetts, 1961, p. 181.
