Art: Steichen*

The late great John Pierpont Morgan once sat for his portrait. Because he sat impatiently, badly, the painter wanted a photograph to help him. Banker Morgan agreed to allow a photographer just two minutes for the job. The next day he arrived punctually to find Photographer Edward J. Steichen, 27, waiting for him. Mr. Steichen had been there for a half-hour studying lights and shades, posing the janitor of the building in the chair where Banker Morgan would sit. Briskly he shunted the sitter to his seat. Banker Morgan sat down, glared into the lens. Snap. One picture was taken. Said Steichen:

“Now—would you please sit a little differently? Just swing your head around and we’ll have it.”

Mr. Morgan moved his head around, then swung it back into the identical position. But Photographer Steichen had got what he wanted—his subject had relaxed. It was the same pose, but more naturally and easily arrived at. Snap. Another picture. Exactly two minutes had elapsed.

“I like you, young man. I think we’ll get along first rate together.” He arose and as he departed took out a wad of bills, flipped five $100 notes to the painter.

“Give this to the young man,” he said.

When Photographer Steichen next saw Banker Morgan, he showed him prints of the two pictures. Banker Morgan liked the first, tense pose, ordered a dozen copies. The second, Photographer Steichen’s favorite, showed the subject looming characteristically massive out of Rembrandtesque shadow. A trick of light made the chair arm look like a broad, naked knife in Banker Morgan’s hand. Banker Morgan looked at this picture, tore it in shreds.

Back to his studio went Photographer Steichen, sorely nettled. He labored over the second plate until he got a fine, enlarged print. He showed it around. Everybody liked it. Belle da Costa Greene, able Morgan librarian, pronounced it the greatest portrait of her boss which she had ever seen. When she showed it to him, he declared he had never seen it before, authorized her to buy it. She made a bid of $5,000 to famed pioneer Photographer Alfred Stieglitz (TIME, Feb. 25), then editor of Camera Work, who owned the print. He refused. She then begged Photographer Steichen for another print. For three years he too refused.

“It was my childish way of getting even,” he later said.

Photographer Steichen was born in Milwaukee in 1879, son of a copper miner and a milliner. His boyhood was spent doing odd jobs. He was the first bicycle messenger in Milwaukee. Because he liked to draw and had bought a camera with his savings, he was apprenticed at 15 to American Lithographing Co., where, for three dollars a week, he washed spittoons, swept floors. Soon he was drawing advertisements. Most famed was his large poster of a voluptuously reclining lady with the legend, “Cascarets; they work while you sleep.”

Meantime he took photographs and sent them to exhibitions. He had learned how to get suffused-light effects by spitting on the lens, how to jar the camera for double-vision. But he quickly abandoned these “arty” expediencies. His work came to the notice of Alfred Stieglitz who then, as ever, was championing rebel art-causes. In the New York Camera Club Steichen met Stieglitz. He showed his work and Stieglitz, delighted, bought some prints at $5 each.

In Paris Steichen met the late great Sculptor Auguste Rodin. The two became fast friends. Steichen journeyed around France photographing people of repute and of no repute. When he finally decided that photography, not painting, was his metier, he bonfired all his canvases.

When the War came he was made a U. S. Colonel, chief of the Photographic Section of the Air Service. Under him were 55 officers, 1,000 men. They flew over German lines, “shot” the enemy territory.

Today Edward Steichen is the highest-paid photographer in the country. For his cold cream and lotion ads, his celebrities for the Conde Nast smartcharts Vogue and Vanity Fair, he often receives $1,000 a print. To his Manhattan studio have gone such notables as Henry Louis Mencken, Greta Garbo and Gloria Swanson.

At 50 Steichen is tall and kinetic. He speaks with the shade of an accent, is didactic, extremely fussy. He believes that most fine art has been accomplished for a price and has no patience with “art for art’s sake.” He may spend hours for his own pleasure posing a grasshopper until he gets a superb metallic-looking magnification of the insect, or picturizing scores of flowerpots in a wheelbarrow (his favorite photograph) because they suggest a queer infinitude of curves, or revealing a dark moth in awesome shadows (“Diagram of Doom”).

*STEICHEN THE PHOTOGRAPHER—by his brother-in-law Poet Carl Sandburg—Harcourt, Brace, & Co. ($25).