Teaching a Century to See

By Paul Gray

STIEGLITZ: A MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY by Sue Davidson Lowe; Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 456 pages; $25.50 ALFRED STIEGLITZ: PHOTOGRAPHS & WRITINGS; Callaway; 247 pages; $75

Exactly a century ago, a young American studying engineering in Berlin paid $7.50 for his first camera. His name was Alfred Stieglitz, and the centennial of that impulsive purchase is worth celebrating. For in the intervening years, Stieglitz did more than anyone else to elevate photography from a curiosity or hobby to a respectable member of the visual arts. He did so both by example (his pictures were instantly recognized as transcendent) and by precept (he lectured, hectored and lobbied constantly on behalf of his crusade for the camera). He also established and ran galleries and magazines, and took up the task of forcing fellow Americans to look at 20th century art and like it.

The current flurry of commemoration attests to his success. An exhibit of Stieglitz photographs is now on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, B.C., and will travel later this year to New York City and Chicago. Those who cannot go to Stieglitz can bring Stieglitz to them. Two new books, one mostly words and the other chiefly pictures, offer a rounded portrait of an irascible, eccentric and authentic American genius.

Stieglitz was born (1864) a year before Lincoln was assassinated and died (1946) a year after Hiroshima. The author of Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography knew him only during the last 20 years of his life. But Sue Davidson Lowe is his grandniece and thus was privy, as she grew up, to glimpses of an artist that outsiders seldom saw. He was Uncle Al to her, an old gent who liked chocolate ice cream cones and miniature golf, and who used summers at the Stieglitz family compound in Lake George, N.Y., to relax and flirt innocently with young female relatives. She knew him as a character before she bumped into his legend: "It was not until 1932 or 1933, when I was ten or eleven years old, that I began to sense the deep respect in which he was held even by the artist and writer friends who visited him at Lake George; it would take considerably longer for me to learn that references to a worldwide reputation were not hyperbole."

Luckily, knowledge of his fame did not erase Lowe's impressions of the person. Stieglitz is as scholarly a production as anyone could wish, crammed with facts and trailing informative appendixes. It is also a loving and occasionally exasperated look at a contentious relative and the intimate circumstances that formed him. Stieglitz spent his life surrounded by family. When he was born, in Hoboken, N.J., he had already accumulated 32 first cousins. His parents, German immigrants grown wealthy in America, gave him five younger siblings, some of whom spent their lives wondering when Alfred would ever grow up. From his teens onward, when he was drawn to photography and modernism in painting and sculpture, the bourgeois he most wanted to epater were his closest kinfolk. Yet he was free to indulge in bohemian pursuits, secure in the knowledge that his family could, however grudgingly, afford him.

He became a professional photographer when there was, strictly speaking, no such job. In the 1890s he emerged as a leading practitioner and theorist of this new technology. He also entered into a socially acceptable marriage with a woman who had money and no interest in anything else. Escaping her presence and their stateroom during one Atlantic crossing, in 1907, he photographed The Steerage, a picture he correctly described as "perfect." By then he was embroiled in the controversies that would occupy much of his career. He battled with those who held photography in contempt, using his power as the editor of Camera Work, an influential quarterly, and his position as an art dealer as weapons. He also fought with other photographers who wondered angrily why he would not print or display work that he declared inadequate.

Lowe's biography underscores a point that has sometimes been forgotten: Stieglitz was a champion of photography but never its apologist. He was generous in the extreme to those who struck him as talented; his proteges included Edward Steichen and Ansel Adams. When he felt that his colleagues were not living up to their medium, however, he abandoned them and turned to new European painting and sculpture. At 291, his small gallery on Fifth Avenue, he staged one-man shows for Henri Rousseau and Picasso, the first either had received anywhere. He also introduced American gallerygoers to a Who's Who of modern artists, including Cezanne, Matisse, Rodin, Brancusi, Toulouse-Lautrec and Georgia O'Keeffe. Stieglitz's affair with O'Keeffe, 24 years his junior, broke up his marriage of 25 years and scandalized a few relatives at Lake George. The happy couple, who eventually married in 1924, made no secret of their sexual bond. Lowe recalls a dinner table memory shared with her older sister: "In my day . . . an occasional exchange of winks could trigger Georgia's blouse-unbuttoning sprint up the stairs and Alfred's laughing pursuit--and the red-faced elders' rush into conversation to stifle Peggy's and my childish questions." The photographer was then in his early 60s.

Stieglitz abounds with such remembrance, personal touches that fill in a public career. Lowe describes what it was like to be photographed by Stieglitz, a taskmaster who demanded poses of three or four minutes for a single exposure, giving the subject cramps and much time to observe: "The tall tripod, the large wooden box of the camera, the plates carefully inserted and removed, the delicate groan of the advancing and retreating lens as it was tuned into focus, the black muslin under which Uncle Alfred's head dived when at last he was ready, the wheeze of the shutter, and, finally, my reprieve." She also looks back with comic dismay to her visits to the last of Stieglitz's galleries, on Madison Avenue. There he would force her to examine pictures while he gave a running commentary to assembled adults: "See that child? She knows more about what you call Art than you'll know when you're a hundred."

For all his theorizing, the proof of Stieglitz's triumph still rests in his photographs. Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs & Writings offers 73 plates culled from the 1,600 works that O'Keeffe donated to the National Gallery of Art after Stieglitz's death. The reproductions are exquisite. The old master, who sometimes developed scores of prints from a single negative to produce one that he liked, could not fault the painstaking care devoted to this book. It contains The Steerage (1907), of course, and also Winter, Fifth Avenue (1893), an early work that helped make Stieglitz famous. Yet every page turns up a gem, an unforgettable image.

Stieglitz's works are deceptively simple, accomplishments theoretically available to any shutterbug with a decent camera. Yet his artistry lies precisely in this mistaken impression. His chief contribution to photography was the absolute clarity of his vision. He never fell back on gimmickry, never allowed ingenuity or cleverness to distort his focus. He looked steadily at people, places and things and allowed them to speak to the eyes of others. If his images seem familiar now, that is because Stieglitz taught this century to see them. --By Paul Gray

Excerpt

" 'Uncle Al?' His eyes opened; a satyr's twinkle. His other hand grasped my knee. Nice firm leg, he said approvingly. Don't ever shave. No, you're not a child any more. Run along, or your grandmother will be scolding me again. Come again tomorrow." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.