Lot 5
  • 5

Edward Steichen 1879-1973

bidding is closed

Description

  • Edward Steichen
  • 'the pool -- evening: a symphony to a race and to a soul'
platinum print, with hand-applied ink border, mounted to gray paper, mounted again to a large sheet of heavy buff paper, with the photographer's elongated, stylized monogram and titled by him in pencil on the mount, 1899; accompanied by a backboard from an earlier frame, with a Montreal Museum of Fine Arts exhibition label and a Gilman Paper Company label on the reverse

Provenance

The photographer to Gertrude Käsebier

Sotheby's New York, 9 November 1976, Sale 3918, Lot 248

Acquired by Helios Arts, Inc., New York, from the above

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the above, 1977

Exhibited

The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe, June - October 1995

Literature

Jean Clair, Guy Cogeval, Debora Silverman, et al., Lost Paradise: Symbolist Europe (The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1995, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 168, cat. 415 (this print)

Other prints of this image: 

Camera Notes, Volume 4, No. 3 (New York, January 1901), as 'Landscape'

Charles H. Caffin, Photography as a Fine Art (New York, 1901, Morgan & Morgan edition, 1971), p. 148, as 'The Pool -- Evening'

Camera Work Number 2, pl. II (New York, April 1903), as 'The Pool'

Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York, 1963), pl. 8

Carl Sandburg, Alexander Liberman, et al., Steichen the Photographer (The Museum of Modern Art, 1961, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 21

Dennis Longwell, Steichen: The Master Prints 1895 - 1914, The Symbolist Period (The Museum of Modern Art, 1978), pl. 4

Weston Naef, The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Fifty Pioneers of Modern Photography (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978), cat. 453

Joanna Steichen, Steichen's Legacy: Photographs, 1895 - 1973 (New York, 2000), pl. 22

Joel Smith, Edward Steichen: The Early Years (Princeton University Press and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), pl. 2

William Innes Homer and Catherine Johnson, Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession, 1902 (New York, 2002), p. 100

William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the American Avant-Garde (Boston, 1977), pl. 15

Catalogue Note

‘The Pool---Evening: A Symphony to a Race and to a Soul’ is one of the photographer’s earliest significant landscape photographs, made in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when he was only twenty years old.  This lyrical study of woods at twilight was one of  Steichen’s first photographs to be included in competitive salons, one of his first to be published, and one of a select group of only three to be purchased by Alfred Stieglitz upon the occasion of his first meeting with Steichen in New York City in 1900.  The print of this image purchased by Stieglitz is now in the Art Institute of Chicago, and is inscribed on the reverse in Stieglitz’s hand, ‘Steichen’s first “Masterpiece.”’  The woods at twilight or evening is a theme that would occupy Steichen for the next two decades. 

The ‘Pool—Evening’ belongs to a group of early woodland studies made by Steichen near his family’s Milwaukee home.  These photographs, reproduced in Naef 451 and 452, A Life in Photography, pls. 9–12, and Longwell, The Master Prints, pls. 3, 5, 6, and 7, show Steichen’s stated affinity for ‘chiefly landscapes, the woods at twilight and dusk, that appealed to [him]’ in his early artistic career.   Apprenticed to a lithographic firm as a teenager, the precocious Steichen was a talented draftsman who taught himself photography, first as an aid to his graphic work and later as an end in itself.   Keenly interested in painting and the world of ‘art’ that lay beyond the confines of Wisconsin, Steichen brought a painter’s ambition to his subjects.  From an early age, he had followed, as best he could, developments in the art world through the picture magazines in the local library:  ‘The Pool’ shows his awareness of trends both in contemporary Pictorial photography and painting, all gleaned from the reproductions in the art and photography journals of the time. As he stated in an oft-quoted sentence from his autobiography, ‘I was an “impressionist” without knowing it.’ 

The ‘Pool—Evening’ and its related studies are a testament not only to Steichen’s natural gifts for composition and design, but his innate ability to transform the seemingly ordinary into artistic statements of great flair and beauty.   He would use this gift for transformation throughout his long and varied career, from his earliest Pictorial experiments, to his first important portrait commissions, and then to his extensive body of popular photographs of the myriad personalities he portrayed for Condé Nast.  ‘The Pool—Evening,’ as he later wrote in his autobiography, ‘was, in fact, a picture of a puddle of water with mud clots protruding.’  The woods lay at the end of a Milwaukee streetcar line, and as Steichen wrote,

‘These became my stamping grounds, especially during autumn, winter, and early spring.  They were particularly appealing on gray or misty days, or very late in the afternoon and at twilight.  Under those conditions, the woods had moods, and the moods aroused emotional reactions that I tried to render in photographs. . . The haunting, elusive quality of twilight excited in me an emotion that I felt compelled to evoke in the images I was making.  Emotional reaction to the qualities of places, things, and people became the principal goal in my photography’ (A Life in Photography, unpaginated, Chapter 1). 

‘The Pool—Evening’ is among the photographer’s earliest photographs to be shown in both national and international salons.  It may have been included in a group of pictures Steichen submitted to the second Philadelphia Photographic Salon of 1899, his first foray into the world of competitive exhibitions.  Impressed by reviews of that city’s first salon of photographs, held the year before at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Steichen carefully strategized which of his works would be best received by the next year’s jury.  Although Steichen later recalled that only two pictures were accepted, a contemporary review of the 1899 show indicates that there were three photographs by Steichen on the walls; Steichen biographer Penelope Niven speculates that the ‘Pool’ may have been the third, in addition to the documented ‘Self-Portrait, Milwaukee,’ and ‘Lady in a Doorway’ (Steichen: A Biography, New York, 1997, p. 57).  It is possible that the ‘Pool’ image offered here was the ‘Frost-Covered Pool’ accepted the following year by the first Chicago Salon, where it was favorably reviewed by the art critic Charles Caffin.  Soon after, Caffin published the present image in his classic 1901 volume, Photography as a Fine Art: The Achievement and Possibilities of Photographic Art in America.  Naef 453 lists six additional exhibition venues for this image, including Brussels, Turin, New York, Denver, Pittsburgh, and Vienna, from 1901 through 1904. 

Encouraged by his mother and emboldened by his success in the Philadelphia and Chicago salons, Steichen set off for Paris in the spring of 1900.  It was Clarence White, one of the judges of the 1899 Philadelphia Salon, who recommended that he stop in New York to meet Stieglitz.  This legendary first meeting of two of the giants of twentieth-century American photography is well-documented in the literature.   Steichen was astounded when, after reviewing his portfolio, Stieglitz chose three photographs for his collection, including the image offered here, and suggested a price of $5.00 each, far beyond what most photographers’ work would have commanded at the time.   Stieglitz proceeded to publish the image in Camera Notes in 1901, where it was the only photograph by Steichen selected for photogravure reproduction in the entire run of the magazine; and in 1903 in Camera Work Number 2, the first of three all-Steichen numbers of that periodical. 

The title of the present image appears to have evolved over the years, as evidenced by its variant titles in early publications and exhibitions; the meaning of the present print’s poetic subtitle---‘A Symphony to a Race and to a Soul’ --remains somewhat obscure.   In the January 1901 Camera Notes, perhaps the image’s earliest publication, it is given the generic title, ‘Landscape.’  In Caffin’s 1901 Photography as a Fine Art, it has become ‘The Pool—Evening.’  In 1902, it was exhibited in Turin as ‘Stagno’ (cf. Naef 453), and in Camera Work Number 2, it is simply ‘The Pool.’  As of this writing, no other examples of this image with the subtitle ‘A Symphony to a Race and to Soul’ have been located.

The political and philosophical climate that surrounded the young Steichen in his early years in Milwaukee may help to explain the tone of the subtitle, if not its exact meaning.  In her article ‘Edward Steichen’s Socialism’ (History of Photography, Volume 17, Number 4, Winter 1993), Melinda Boyd Parsons describes in detail a particular brand of German-American socialism that was prevalent in certain immigrant communities at the turn of the century.  As Parsons relates, this socialism was anti-materialistic, championed the artisan-worker, and held in particular reverence the family unit and women in general.   Steichen’s sister Lilian was a committed socialist, as were a number of Milwaukee’s prominent citizens, many of whom were friends of the Steichen family.   Parsons draws convincing parallels between Steichen’s non-conformist streak—expressed in his involvement with artistic ‘secession’ groups, among other things—and the socialist society’s belief in the value of the common man.   Indeed, although Parsons’s article concludes with Steichen’s first trip to Paris, it is not too far a stretch to see some of these early socialist ideals implemented by Steichen in his most populist exhibition, the 1955 Family of Man.  

In another article, ‘”Moonlight on Darkening Ways”: Concepts of Nature and the Artist in Edward and Lilian Steichen’s Socialism’ (American Art, Volume 11, Number 1, Spring 1997), Parsons  quotes extensively from the correspondence between Steichen and his sister in the early years of the last century, in which ideas of a ‘democratic art’ and socialism are intermingled.  In 1908, Lilian Steichen fell in love with a young labor organizer and poet named Carl Sandburg, and in her letters to him of that year, she described her close philosophical and spiritual connections to her brother:

‘You see brother and I are very sympathetic—we’ve watched storms come up together—we’ve made pilgrimages together on moonlit nights to birch woods listening in the silence for the heavy fall of the dewdrop—we’ve looked at his pictures together.  So he knows that our tastes are akin [and] that I too have some poetic insight. . . for Socialist propaganda and pilgrimages to birch woods have the same well-spring’ (quoted in Parsons, ibid., p. 75). 

Although Parsons’s articles do not point to an exact source for the subtitle of the present image, her texts refer to a number of socialistically-inclined authors, both American and European, whose works Steichen knew and whose philosophies may have influenced his idealistic sub-titling of the photograph. Most tantalizing is Parsons’s reference to another Lilian Steichen letter to Sandburg, in which she says that her brother’s ‘Whitmanic prints are yet to be done!’   Certainly the tone of Steichen’s subtitle echoes Walt Whitman’s poetry, and a simple search of the poet’s verse turns up several corresponding phrases, among them ‘Athwart my soul, moves the symphony true’ (from Abraham Lincoln, 1888-89); and ‘are gone in twilight, (Race of the woods, the landscapes free,  . . ),’ and ‘day over, the world, the race, the soul,--in space and time. . .,’  (both from Leaves of Grass). If Whitman is the philosophical source for the photograph’s subtitle, this would not be the only time Steichen was inspired by American verse.  As Joel Smith has noted, another of Steichen’s evening pool studies, the ‘Pond—Moonlight’ of Lot 6 was once reproduced under the title Solitude, which Smith relates to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s poem ‘Waldeinsamkeit,’ or ‘forest solitude,’ and the spirit of American Transcendentalism (Edward Steichen: The Early Years, Princeton, 1999, p. 44, fn. 78).    

The image offered here comes originally from a celebrated album of photographs, drawings, and photogravures given by Steichen to the photographer Gertrude Käsebier, the ‘first lady of American photography’ at the turn of the last century.  This legendary album was sold in these rooms in November of 1976.  For a discussion of the 1976 auction at Sotheby’s, cf. Beth Gates-Warren, Twenty Years of Photography at Sotheby’s, a supplement to Sale 6684, April 1995; and Naef, p. 160, where he speculates that the album was given by Steichen to Käsebier in August 1901. A founding member of the Photo-Secession who later became Steichen’s lifelong friend, Käsebier (1852 – 1934) had served on the jury of the second Philadelphia Photographic Salon in 1899, the first competitive exhibition to accept Steichen’s work.  She met Steichen for the first time in Paris in 1900, and introduced him to two young American sisters for whom she served as chaperone on their first trip abroad, Charlotte and Clara Smith of Missouri.  Clara Smith later became Steichen’s first wife (cf. Niven, op. cit., pp. 118-20).

At the time of this writing, only three other prints of ‘The Pool—Evening’ have been located, all platinum prints in institutions: the print in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a gift of Alfred Stieglitz in 1933; the aforementioned print in the Art Institute of Chicago, a gift of Georgia O’Keeffe in 1949; and one in the Royal Photographic Society collection, now in Bradford, England, a gift of Frederick Evans in 1937.