Alfred Stieglitz

1922

The photographer to Sherwood Anderson

By descent to his widow, Eleanor Anderson

Private collection

Sotheby’s New York, 16 and 17 October 1990, Sale 6073, Lot 130

Christie’s New York, 29 April 1999, Sale 9150, Lot 269, Lee Marks Fine Art as agent

Greenough 792

Therese Mulligan, The Photography of Alfred Stieglitz: Georgia O’Keeffe’s Enduring Legacy (George Eastman House, 2000), pl. 24

Sarah Greenough and Juan Hamilton, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs and Writings (National Gallery of Art, 1983), pl. 56

Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York, 1960), pl. 39

John Szarkowski, Alfred Stieglitz at Lake George (The Museum of Modern Art, 1995), p. 67

Doris Bry, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographer (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1995), pl. 38

Sarah Greenough, et al., Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (National Gallery of Art, 2000), p. 286

John Szarkowski, The Photographer and the American Landscape (The Museum of Modern Art, 1963), p. 23

Sarah Greenough, et al., On The Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography (National Gallery of Art, Washington, and The Art Institute of Chicago, 1989), pl. 210

In Focus: Alfred Stieglitz (J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), pl. 35

The photograph is on double-weight paper with a very matte surface. There is faint silvering in the dark areas, appropriate for a print of this age. When examined closely in raking light, some tiny spots of original retouching can be seen. But there is really nothing that undermines the overwhelmingly harmonious impression of this photograph.
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This photograph comes originally from the collection of the novelist and poet Sherwood Anderson (1876–1941), one of a group of artists and writers drawn to Stieglitz as a champion of the American style in the arts.    Anderson was a friend to both Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe.  His simple, realistic prose style was hailed as a revelation in its day, and like other members of the Stieglitz circle he was seen as something of a cultural revolutionary.  Remembered today primarily for his novel Winesburg, Ohio, he exerted considerable influence on American writers of a later generation, among them Hemingway and Faulkner.   He contributed an essay to the 1934 volume America & Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait. 

This print is astonishing for the level of detail it portrays in the black and gray tonal ranges.  As with Out of Window—291, this twilight view would have presented a challenge to print.  Stieglitz has handled the challenge with characteristic mastery, delineating precise detail along the ridgeline, and, of course, in the clapboard house-front that punctuates the bottom of the picture.

"I have been looking for years—50 upwards—at a particular sky line of simple hills—how can I tell the world in words what that line is—changing as it does every moment.—I’d love to get down what ‘that’ line has done for me—May be I have—somewhat—in those snapshots I've been doing the last few years."  

Alfred Stieglitz, in a letter to Sherwood Anderson, 1925