Art: Steiglitz into Metropolitan

In Manhattan is a primly-styled, stone building which houses the Anderson Galleries, famed red plush repository of art and art auctions. On the third floor is tiny Room 303, known as the Intimate Gallery, littered with picture frames, books, mucilage pots, framed and unframed paintings. In the room, at almost any time during the winter season, may be found a keen-eyed little man in a baggy grey suit. He peers inquisitively through silver spectacles, his grey mustache and hair are scraggly, uncombed. His name is Alfred Stieglitz. He is a lover and maker of photographs.* And he is one of the quietest and most admired characters in the art world.

For years Alfred Stieglitz fostered the careers of leading modern painters, such as his second wife, Georgia O’Keeffe,† and water-colorist John Marin. And for years Alfred Stieglitz has been studying beauty with his cameras.

Last week he heard that 22 of his prints had been donated to Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum by five persons, among them Tobacco Tycoon David A. Schulte. More important, they have been accepted and will be hung in the black-and-white section among etchings and engravings.

Manhattan, not Florence, Venice or Paris, is the modern cynosure of esthetic eyes. No matter how disinterested the artists, the art centre is always where patrons are thickest, where coffers are bulging. Never before had Manhattan’s greatest museum received photographs into its collections. Such a reception was thus a victory of great moment for photography and for Alfred Stieglitz.

Born in dismal Hoboken, N.J., in 1864, Stieglitz went to private and public schools and to the College of the City of New York. Following his father’s wishes, he studied mechanical engineering. But photochemistry and photography allured him, and he turned to these subjects, receiving a thorough Germanic induction at the Berlin Polytechnic School and the University of Berlin (1888-90). Returning to Manhattan, he practiced photo-engraving for three years, experimented in three-color work, married Emmeline Obermeyer of New York. Then, in 1895, at 31, he “retired.”

He did not become an ample idler; he took pictures, thousands of them. He had always believed that photography was a medium of art which could be as sensitive, as interpretative as painting, etching or engraving. Out of the confused mass of forms in the visible world he selected serene or startling shapes and contours, the tense grace of sewing fingers, the slopes and rotundities of the nude. These he rendered with the infinite photographic spectrum, ranging from dead white to midnight blackness through numberless greys, catching both gleams and shadows. Sometimes he intellectualized this sensuous process, as in his symbolic expression of a short-skirted girl—a picture of a leg superimposed upon the dim image of a face. There is nothing documentary about Stieglitz photographs; they tell no stories, perpetuate no events. They are studies in pure form and tone.

Photographer Stieglitz neither titles them nor signs them. “They have their own life,” he says, “and they live in that way, if you see what I mean.” More astonishing, he never sells or publishes his work. They are kept in vaults, while their creator waits for recognition from museums. The Progress Medal of the Royal Photographic Society of London has been awarded to only two U. S. citizens: Alfred Stieglitz and George Eastman, multi-millionaire Kodak tycoon of Rochester, N. Y., whose developments in photography supplied the technical basis of Mr. Stieglitz’s art.

Alfred Stieglitz is not an egocentric. For years he patiently championed other artists. He kept a table reserved at Manhattan’s old Holland House where his impoverished friends could always eat by giving the name of their usually absent host. In his little office he has exhibited and sold many pictures for needy and worthy beginners.

Parallel with these benefactions has been his own struggle to make the pundits of art bestow their haughty panegyrics on photography. More than 25 years ago museums in Glasgow and Dresden hung his prints. The U. S. was more obdurate. Five years ago, however, the Boston Museum opened its doors and seven Stieglitz prints were hung there between the black-and-white works of Goya and Dürer.

*Not to be confused with Edward Steichen, able modernistic photographer for Vanity Fair, Vogue and other smart-charts.

†Georgia O’Keeffe is a modulator of exquisite colors in floral and abstract designs (TIME, Feb. 20, 1928). Her exhibitions are events for advanced esthetes. Last week an O’Keeffe exhibition opened in Husband Stieglitz’s Room 303.