Edward Steichen 1879-1973

direct carbon photograph, signed and dated by the photographer in crayon on the image, mounted to thick board, signed and dated by the photographer in crayon, and with a printed numerical label on the reverse, matted, 1908

The photographer to Paul B. Haviland

Harry Lunn, Jr., Washington, D. C.

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the above, 1982

New York, Hirschl and Adler Galleries, The Eye of Stieglitz, October - November 1978

The Museum of Modern Art, From the Gilman Collection: Photographs Preserved in Ink, November 1984 - February 1985

Paris, Procédés, Procédés, Palais de Tokyo, October - November 1987

Pierre Apraxine and Lee Marks, Photographs from the Collection of the Gilman Paper Company (White Oak Press, 1985), pl. 132 (this print)

Other prints of this image: 

Camera Work Number 34/35 (New York, 1911), pl. II, as ‘Balzac—The Open Sky’

Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York, 1963), pl. 53

Carl Sandburg, Alexander Liberman, et al., Steichen the Photographer (The Museum of Modern Art, 1961, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 30

Weston Naef, The Collection of Alfred Stieglitz: Fifty Pioneers of Modern Photography (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1978), cat. 485

Dennis Longwell, Steichen: The Master Prints 1895 - 1914, The Symbolist Period (The Museum of Modern Art, 1978), pl. 67

Joanna Steichen, Steichen's Legacy: Photographs, 1895 - 1973 (New York, 2000), pl. 127

Joel Smith, Edward Steichen: The Early Years (Princeton University Press and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999), pl. 48

Sarah Greenough et al., Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries (National Gallery of Art, 2000), fig. 12

 

This powerful and imposing photograph of Rodin’s famous statue of Balzac was taken in the moonlight near the sculptor’s home at Meudon in October 1908.  Like ‘The Pond—Moonlight’ of Lot 6, the photograph offered here is believed to be one of only three prints of the photograph extant in this extraordinarily large size.  The photograph is a seminal image from an extensive series of studies the photographer made of the sculptor and his work, a series that includes not only other Balzac photographs, but also the famous double-negative study of Rodin posed in front of ‘The Thinker’ and other portraits of Rodin in a variety of processes, including gum prints, platinum prints, and autochromes.  Meeting Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917) and seeing his work were the inspiration for the young Steichen’s first trip to Paris in 1900.  Passionate, deeply committed to his artistic ideals, and above all controversial, the sculptor represented for Steichen all that was potent and revolutionary in modern aesthetics.  Rodin became one of Steichen’s closest friends, a friendship that ended only with Captain Edward Steichen’s presence, as representative of the United States Army, at Rodin’s funeral in 1917.  Soon after meeting Rodin for the first time in 1901, Steichen became the sculptor’s anointed photographer and was paid prices for his photographs that were far in excess of any at that time. Steichen not only photographed Rodin, he also worked to promote the sculptor’s work in the United States, arranging for shows of Rodin’s drawings at the galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1908 and 1910, for instance, and collaborating with Stieglitz to create a special issue of Camera Work devoted to Rodin, his sculpture, and his drawings.  For his part, Rodin referred to Steichen as ‘mon fils.’

In his Life in Photography, Steichen remembered the first picture he saw of Rodin’s Balzac: a reproduction in a Milwaukee newspaper in 1898.  Even in a newspaper reproduction, Steichen recounted, the Balzac ‘seemed the most wonderful thing I had ever seen.  It was not just a statue of a man; it was the very embodiment of a tribute to genius.  It looked like a mountain come to life.  It stirred up my interest in going to Paris, where artists of Rodin’s stature lived and worked’ (Chapter 2, unpaginated).  That a statue of Balzac could make the news in Milwaukee was testament to the controversy created by Rodin’s sculpture at that time. Commissioned by the Société Gens de Lettres some years before, the Balzac was first introduced to the public as a plaster cast at the Salon Nationale des Beaux-Arts of 1898, where it generated an outcry.  As Steichen remembered, the statue ‘was called a monstrosity by some and by others a sack of flour with a head stuck on top’ (ibid., Chapter 2, unpaginated).  The statue was ultimately refused by the Société that had commissioned it, but Rodin, in a characteristically dramatic gesture, built his own pavilion outside the gates of the 1900 Exposition Universelle, and there displayed selected examples of his own work, including Balzac. 

It was to this pavilion that Steichen and his traveling companion Carl Bjorncrantz rushed on the very day they arrived in Paris in 1900.   At the pavilion, they saw not only the infamous Balzac, but also caught a glimpse of Rodin, ‘a stocky man with massive head, almost like a bull’s,’ as Steichen remembered in A Life in Photography.   Determined to meet Rodin and to photograph him, Steichen wrangled an invitation to the master’s studio in 1901, through a painter who knew Rodin, the Norwegian Fritz Thaulow, whose children Steichen had been asked to photograph.  Steichen and the Thaulows bicycled to Meudon one afternoon, where an initial meeting turned into an invitation to dinner, and then an evening that concluded with a review by Rodin of Steichen’s portfolio of photographs.  Impressed, and perhaps recognizing in the young Steichen the spirit of a fellow revolutionary, Rodin assented to Steichen’s request for a portrait sitting.  Thus began a long and fruitful relationship between the two artists: it is said that Steichen photographed Rodin more than any other sitter, and that Rodin and his work were photographed by Steichen more than by any other photographer.  In the double issue of Camera Work devoted to his art, Rodin wrote, ‘I consider Steichen a very great artist and the leading, the greatest photographer of all time’ (Number 34/35, 1911). 

In the fall of 1908, during Steichen’s third sojourn in France, Rodin invited him to photograph the controversial Balzac.  Dissatisfied with other pictures of the statue, Rodin worked with Steichen to create an image that he hoped would show the Balzac at its most powerful, more than merely a prosaic document of the statue’s mass and lines.  Rodin had some months before moved the sculpture from his studio to a specially-built revolving platform in his garden, and Steichen was able to observe the statue from all angles, at different times of day and night, in many permutations of light and weather.  According to the photographer’s autobiography, it was Rodin who suggested photographing the statue in moonlight.   Having spent years developing his talents for photographing in just such light, Steichen rose to the challenge.  ‘I immediately went out to Meudon to see it, and found that by daylight, it had a harsh, chalky effect,’ Steichen wrote in A Life in Photography.

‘I agreed with Rodin that under the moonlight was the proper way to photograph it, I had no guide to refer to, and I had to guess at the exposure.

‘I spent the whole night photographing the Balzac.  I gave varying exposures from fifteen minutes to an hour, and secured a number of interesting negatives. . . .

‘In the morning, at breakfast, when I lifted the napkin from my plate, I found two one-thousand franc notes.  This was four hundred dollars, a fabulous present for a night’s work!   . . . Instead of showing Rodin proofs, I immediately made enlarged negatives and commenced printing.

‘It wasn’t until a week or so later, when I had fine pigment prints, that I turned up to show them to Rodin.  The prints seemed to give him more pleasure than anything I had ever done.  He said, “You will make the world understand my Balzac through these pictures.  They are like Christ walking on the desert.”

‘When Stieglitz saw a set of the Balzac prints later, he seemed more impressed than with any other prints I had ever shown him.  He purchased them at once and later presented them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. . .

‘During World War I, we had to leave my negatives behind, uncared for in our home in Voulangis when we left.  During the four years of the war, humidity and bacterial action destroyed the emulsions.  The plates were ruined’ (ibid., Chapter 4, unpaginated).   Weston Naef has pointed out that, as original prints of Steichen’s pre-1917 photographs exist in such few numbers, there were probably photographs at Voulangis that were destroyed as well (Naef, p. 458). 

In the spring of 1909, from April 21^st to May 7^th, the galleries of the Photo-Secession held a special exhibition of Steichen’s photographs of Balzac.  The centerpiece of the exhibition was the image offered here, flanked by two horizontal images.  In 1911, three photographs from the Balzac series, including the present image, were reproduced in Camera Work Number 34/35, the special issue devoted to Rodin and his art.

The print offered here is believed to be one of only three extant prints, in this large size, of what is perhaps the most striking and dramatic image from the series.  It was recently analyzed by the conservation department of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and found to be a direct carbon print.  The print of the image which Stieglitz purchased directly from Steichen, referred to above and donated to the Metropolitan in 1933, has also been recently analyzed by the Museum’s conservation department, and it, too, is a direct carbon print.  In 1986, a third print in this size, catalogued, but not scientifically analyzed, as an olive-green pigment print, was sold in these rooms and is now in a private collection (Sale 5453, Lot 372, 12 May 1986).  For more information on this third print and its origins, see Beth Gates-Warren, Twenty Years of Photographs at Sotheby’s, a supplement to Sotheby’s New York catalogue for Sale 6684, April 1995.  A smaller print of this image, measuring roughly 6 by 8 inches, is in the collection of the Musée Rodin (reproduced in the Musée Rodin’s 1898: Le Balzac de Rodin, Paris, 1998, pl. 164, p. 409).

The present print comes originally from the collection of Paul Burty Haviland (1880 - 1950), heir to the Haviland china dynasty and an amateur photographer (cf. Lot 12).  Appropriately, it was Haviland’s purchase of a Rodin drawing from the Photo-Secession galleries’ Rodin exhibition of 1908 that was his introduction to Alfred Stieglitz.   Haviland later became an important source of support for Stieglitz and personally underwrote the rent for the space at 291 Fifth Avenue when money was short.  Along with Marius de Zayas and Agnes Ernst Meyer, Haviland also funded the important arts publication edited by Stieglitz, ‘291’ (see Lot 1).