Synopses & Reviews
A master photographer, Alfred Stieglitz was also a visionary promoter and anand#160;avid collector of modern American and European art from the first half of the twentieth century. Operating a succession of influential Manhattan galleries from 1905 to 1946, he exhibited many of the most important artists of the era, including Constantin Brancusi, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Vasily Kandinsky, John Marin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, Francis Picabia, and Pablo Picasso. The collection heand#160;assembledand#160;of their worksand#8212;by purchase, gift, and happy accidentand#8212;wasand#160;of exceptional breadth and depth and has since become the cornerstone of the Metropolitan Museum's holdings of modern art since 1949.
This volume is the first catalogue of the Metropolitan's unparalleled Alfred Stieglitz Collection:and#160;more than four hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints made between the 1880s and the 1940s. After an illuminating introduction that traces the collection's formation and surprising dand#233;nouement, thirty-one short essays serve as focused biographies of the dealer and each of the artists he cultivated and collected, demonstrating the intense and often intimate relationships that affected artistic direction, financial well-being (or its opposite), and social and professional prestige. These discussions are enriched by new scholarship, technical analysis, and archival research, and many works in the colleciton are published here for teh first time. Seen together in splendid color reproductions, they present a portrait of a supreme connoisseurand#8212;a man who acted as "midwife" in the creation of twentieth-century art.
Synopsis
"It's not money or painting between us. But something above both." and#8212;Stieglitz to artist Stanton Macdonald-Wright (1918)
Synopsis
A master photographer, Alfred Stieglitz was also a visionary promoter and avid collector of modern American and European art from the first half of the 20th century. This publication is the first fully illustrated catalogue of works in the unparalleled Alfred Stieglitz Collection, which was given to the Metropolitan Museum after Stieglitz's death.
Operating a succession of influential New York galleries between 1905 and 1946, Stieglitz exhibited many of the most important artists of the era, including Constantin Brancusi, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Vasily Kandinsky, John Marin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, and Gino Severini. He assembled a vast collection of exceptional breadth and depth that has since become the cornerstone of the Metropolitan Museum's holdings of modern art, containing such masterworks as Brancusi's Sleeping Muse, Demuth's I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, Hartley's Portrait of a German Officer, Kandinsky's Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II), O'Keeffe's Black Iris and Picasso's Woman Ironing and Standing Female Nude.
More than four hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints are presented in this catalogue, many of them published here for the first time. Informative essays, augmented by archival photographs and letters, new scholarship, and technical analysis, bring this fascinating period to life by focusing on the relationships these artists developed with Stieglitz and with one another.
About the Author
Lisa Mintz Messinger is Associate Curator in the Department of Nineteenth-Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.