Alfred Stieglitz

flush-mounted, mounted again to board, framed, 1935

Doris Bry, New York, 1993

Greenough 1571

Therese Mulligan, The Photography of Alfred Stieglitz: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Enduring Legacy (George Eastman House, 2000), pl. 38

LIFE Library of Photography: Great Photographers (New York, 1971), p. 129

Mike Weaver, ed., The Art of Photography, 1839-1989 (Yale University Press, 1989), pl. 210

Christian A. Peterson, Masterpiece Photographs from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2008), p. 63

Manfred Heiting, et al., At the Still Point: Photographs from the Manfred Heiting Collection in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Volume II, Part 1 (Los Angeles and Amsterdam, in conjunction with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2009), p. 97

This period, this print is on a nearly matte surface paper. Its slight sheen suggests that Stieglitz may have coated the print in some way, as he was known to do in order to achieve the precise surface quality he required of his prints. When examined in high raking light, several tiny areas of original retouching can be seen. There is faint age-appropriate silvering in the print's dark areas. Stieglitz flush-mounted this print to thin board, as was his practice in this period of his career. The flush-mounted print is mounted onto a larger sheet of off-white board. It is likely that this secondary mount is modern, although it adheres to Stieglitz's precise proportions.
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Like the photograph offered as Lot 4 in the present sale, New York from the Shelton is one of a number of images Stieglitz made of the changing mid-town Manhattan landscape in his later years. The present image looks toward Rockefeller Center from Stieglitz’s apartment in the Shelton Hotel at 49^th Street and Lexington Avenue.  It is one of a small series of photographs taken from an identical vantage point within the apartment in 1935.  The only variations are time of day and the changing patterns of shadows, light, and sky.

Joel Smith, in his ‘How Stieglitz Came to Photograph Cityscapes,’ postulates that these late cityscapes, with their deepening shadows and rising forest of buildings, are a record not only of the city at a particular place and time, but a reflection of Stieglitz as well.  Indeed, Smith calls these late New York views ‘a new kind of Equivalent’ and sees them as ‘spiritual “self-portraits” of An American Place, as Stieglitz would have it to be' (History of Photography, Vol. 20, No. 4, Winter 1996). Their very personal meaning to the photographer is what likely accounts for the power these pictures still have today, and what separates them from the multitude of New York photographs made in the decades since.