Edward Steichen

with annotations and numerical notations in pencil and crayon on the reverse, 1932

Collection of Joanna Steichen, the photographer's widow

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, 2000

Vanity Fair, July 1933, p. 36

Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York, 1963), pl. 213

Joanna Steichen, Steichen's Legacy: Photographs, 1895-1973 (New York, 2000), pl. 198

Todd Brandow and William A. Ewing, Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography (Minneapolis: Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and Musée de L'Elysée, Lausanne, 2007), pl. 163

Richard Pare, Photography and Architecture: 1839-1939 (Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1982), pl. 131

John Szarkowski, Photography Until Now (Museum of Modern Art, 1989), p. 192

This photograph, on smooth double-weight paper with a slight sheen, is in generally excellent condition. Pleasingly warm-toned overall, the whites of the highlights are brightest where the sun reflects off of the building. In raking light, faint age-appropriate silvering is visible, primarily in the black shadows in the lower left corner of the image. Upon very close examination, several small, linear stress creases are visible in the upper left corner of the print. A thin irregular-shaped impression is visible in raking light near the tip of the upper right corner. This print is trimmed to the image, with sporadic resultant minor chipping at the edges. On the reverse of the print are the following: '25' in red crayon; '11x14 glossy,' 'glossy,' and other illegible numerical notations in pencil. The reverse of the print is lightly soiled.
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The Empire State Building, the central motif in Steichen’s 1932 image The Maypole, caused a media frenzy when it was built.  The 1930s saw a race for the title of the world’s tallest building, and the Empire State ultimately triumphed over its neighbor, the Chrysler Building.   Completed in just one year and 45 days, the Empire State and its 102 stories opened in May 1931, during the depths of the Depression.   It quickly became a symbol of the vitality of New York and remained the world’s tallest building until the 1970s.

In 1930, Edward Steichen had his studio in midtown Manhattan, a vortex of Art Deco construction.  From his Beaux Arts perch at 80 West 40^th Street, he could watch, day by day, as the modern Manhattan skyline emerged:  the Chrysler Building at 42^nd and Lexington, Rockefeller Center at Fifth and 49^th, the Waldorf-Astoria at Park and 49^th, and the Empire State at Fifth and 34^th.   The forest of tall buildings rising around him must have been spectacular.  ‘I . . . took my camera around New York and tried to express the significance of the skyscrapers and the bridges,’ he wrote in his autobiographical Life in Photography. ‘The Empire State Building remained a challenge until I conceived of the building as a Maypole and made the double exposure to suggest the swirl of a Maypole dance’ (opposite pl. 209).   The Empire State’s ribbons of windows meshed perfectly with Steichen’s concept, creating a dynamic Modernist composition of vertigo and movement.

When this photograph was reproduced in Vanity Fair in July 1933, its caption announced that the image was slated as a mural for Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition.   The early 1930s were a golden age of photographic murals: Margaret Bourke-White produced a famous series of murals for the NBC Studios at Rockefeller Center, where Steichen’s mural of aviation went up in the Roxy Theatre.   In 1932, The Museum of Modern Art staged the exhibition Murals by American Painters and Photographers, and the photographic murals stole the show.  Steichen’s Maypole and his other mural images—the imposing George Washington Bridge, for instance, or the montage of photographs of Rockefeller Center—reveal yet another aspect of his genius: a designer of images for grand public spaces, dramatic, imposing, and exciting.