Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz
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190023975
Alfred Stieglitz

Alfred Stieglitz

Frank Eugene (American, New York City 1865–1936 Munich)

Date:
1907
Medium:
Platinum print
Dimensions:
16.5 x 11.8 cm. (6 1/2 x 4 5/8 in.)
Classification:
Photographs
Credit Line:
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1955
Accession Number:
55.635.7

This artwork is currently on display in Gallery 852

190015743
William M. Ivins, Jr.

William M. Ivins, Jr.

Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852–1934)

Date:
ca. 1910
Medium:
Platinum print
Classification:
Photographs
Credit Line:
Gift of Barbara Ivins, 1984
Accession Number:
1984.1024.1

Description

The Metropolitan Museum established a Prints Department in 1916, with thirty-five-year-old William M. Ivins Jr. as its first curator. During the next thirty years he built the Museum’s print collection into the most important in America, amassing not only the great works of acknowledged masters but all manner of printed images that would reveal "the whole gamut of human life and endeavor, from the most ephemeral of courtesies to the loftiest pictorial presentation of man’s spiritual aspirations." His all-encompassing view of the graphic arts included photography.
Ivins knew Stieglitz, admired his work, and visited his galleries for a decade before becoming Curator of Prints. Stieglitz’s long association with the Museum and his central role in the promotion of photography as art made it natural that Ivins would join forces with him to introduce photography into the Met’s Prints Department.
It may well have been through Stieglitz that Ivins met Käsebier, a leading Pictorialist photographer at the turn of the century and the subject of the first issue of Camera Work. Appropriately, she portrayed him here as a scholar and connoisseur wholly absorbed by the printed page.

This artwork is currently on display in Gallery 852

190021162
George Bernard Shaw

George Bernard Shaw

Alvin Langdon Coburn (British, Boston, Massachusetts 1882–1966 Denbighshire, Wales)

Date:
ca. 1907
Medium:
Gum bichromate over platinum print
Dimensions:
26.5 x 10.8 cm. (10 7/16 x 4 1/4 in.)
Classification:
Photographs
Credit Line:
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949
Accession Number:
49.55.211

Description

George Bernard Shaw, best known as the witty author of plays that display a rare combination of drama, comedy, and social criticism, was also a passionate amateur photographer. He began taking photographs in 1898 and became an early advocate of photography as a serious art, publishing essays on the medium, reviewing exhibitions, and contributing to ongoing technical discussions.
It is partly thanks to Shaw that Coburn gained his reputation as an acclaimed portrait photographer of the British intellectual elite. During Coburn’s second visit to London, in 1904, he befriended Shaw, who introduced him to some of the most prominent literary, artistic, and political figures in Britain, including George Meredith, H. G. Wells, and Henry James. Shaw loved being photographed, and Coburn happily obliged. Here, he is rendered in strong chiaroscuro and caught in deep contemplation. Shaw’s keen attention to what lies beyond the picture edge recalls his maxim about the subjectivity of all observation: "You are the window through which you must see the world."

This artwork is currently on display in Gallery 852

190019428
Maurice Maeterlinck

Maurice Maeterlinck

Edward J. Steichen (American (born Luxembourg), Bivange 1879–1973 West Redding, Connecticut)

Date:
1901, printed ca. 1903
Medium:
Direct carbon print
Dimensions:
33.2 x 26.5 cm. (13 1/16 x 10 7/16 in.)
Classification:
Photographs
Credit Line:
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Accession Number:
33.43.2

Description

Maeterlinck, whose early Symbolist writings are marked by a profound melancholy, pessimism, and mysticism, was much admired by Steichen, who at a young age read his plays and essays assiduously. Steichen later recalled, "I was terribly romantic and passionate in my early painting days. . . . I remember how Maeterlinck’s essay ‘Silence’ stirred me, how I went out to paint pictures of night and silence in that mood." The admiration was mutual. Maeterlinck penned an appreciation in 1903 for issue 2 of Camera Work, devoted to Steichen; his text was reprinted in 1906 as the introduction of the "Special Steichen Supplement" in which this portrait appeared as the first plate. Steichen appropriately captured the spirit of Maeterlinck’s writing in his portrait of the author immersed in darkness and barely illuminated by an ethereal light.

This artwork is currently on display in Gallery 852

190019371
Zaida Ben-Yusuf

Zaida Ben-Yusuf

F. Holland Day (American, Norwood, Massachusetts 1864–1933 Norwood, Massachusetts)

Date:
1898
Medium:
Platinum print
Dimensions:
Image: 16.3 x 10.9 cm (6 7/16 x 4 5/16 in.) Mount: 17.1 x 11.5 cm (6 3/4 x 4 1/2 in.)
Classification:
Photographs
Credit Line:
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Accession Number:
33.43.148

Description

For a few years before and after 1900, Day rivaled Stieglitz as a promoter of Pictorialism, as turn-of-the-century artistic photography was called, with Boston rather than New York as its geographic center. Day was a largely self-taught photographer, connoisseur, and collector; a great admirer of Keats, Yeats, and Wilde; a publisher in the mold of British Arts and Crafts leader William Morris; and, like Stieglitz, an elected member of the Brotherhood of the Linked Ring, a Pictorialist breakaway from the Royal Photographic Society. In 1900 Day organized a massive exhibition, "The New School of American Photography," containing some 375 photographs by forty-two American Pictorialists. Sensing a threat to his international stature as the dominant photographic tastemaker, Stieglitz not only declined to participate but actively used his influence to block Day’s show from being presented at the rooms of the Linked Ring.
Zaida Ben-Yusuf, who opened a fashionable portrait studio in New York in 1897, was among the photographers included in Day’s blockbuster show, which eventually took place at the Royal Photographic Society and, in 1901, at the Photo-Club de Paris. Unlike Day’s more formal portraits and figure studies, his portrait of Ben-Yusuf gives the impression of spontaneity and accident, with the subject off-center and backlit by a sunny window in the next room.

This artwork is currently on display in Gallery 852

190019602
Kahlil Gibran with Book

Kahlil Gibran with Book

F. Holland Day (American, Norwood, Massachusetts 1864–1933 Norwood, Massachusetts)

Date:
1896
Medium:
Platinum print
Dimensions:
16.0 x 11.8 cm. (6 5/16 x 4 5/8 in.)
Classification:
Photographs
Credit Line:
Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933
Accession Number:
33.43.361

Description

Day grew up in a well-to-do Boston family with a strong sense of social responsibility and a special concern for the city’s immigrant population. Interested in the education of underprivileged youth throughout his life, Day funded and guided the education of the young Lebanese immigrant Kahlil Gibran, encouraging him to study William Blake’s drawings and to read Walt Whitman and Maurice Maeterlinck. Gibran, depicted here at age fourteen, developed into one of the twentieth century’s most widely read poets, best known for his 1923 book The Prophet.

This artwork is currently on display in Gallery 852

1

Artworks (48)

Photographic Treasures from the Collection of Alfred Stieglitz

October 11, 2011–February 26, 2012

A towering figure in early twentieth-century photography, Alfred Stieglitz was not only a master of the medium, but also a powerful tastemaker and tireless advocate for photography as a fine art in the early 1900s. Through his sumptuous and influential journal Camera Work (1902–1917) and his "Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession" (1905–1917), known to insiders simply as "291" for its address on Fifth Avenue, Stieglitz introduced the public to the best of artistic photography and, eventually, modern art. He was also his gallery's best client, supporting the artists he most admired by purchasing their work. Stieglitz's photography collection, donated to the Metropolitan by gift in 1933 and bequest following his death in 1946, constitutes the finest gathering of Photo-Secession works anywhere.

This exhibition, which coincides with the exhibition Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe, presents some forty-eight photographic treasures by Anne Brigman, Alvin Langdon Coburn, F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Joseph Keiley, Heinrich Kühn, Edward Steichen, Clarence White, and others.

Left: Gertrude Käsebier (American, 1852–1934). Blessed Art Thou among Women, 1899. Platinum print; 23 x 13.2 cm (9 1/16 x 5 3/16 in.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1933 (33.43.132)

Related Exhibition

Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe features some two hundred major works by American and European modernists, supplemented by photographs by the Photo-Secessionists and publications by Stieglitz—all from the Metropolitan's holdings.

View all Current Exhibitions

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