Smith's Steichen. - Review - book review

Edward Steichen: The Early Years

Joel Smith

Princeton, NJ and fresh York, NY: Princeton University Pres in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999 167pp/$ 6000 (hb)

Joel Smith's monograph Edward Steichen: The Early Years is a beautifully written addition to the literature upon Edward_Steichen and recommended for readers the pair unfamiliar with and knowledgeable about his work. However, upon a scholarly level it fails to take advantage of important of recent origin ideas in current research that reposition Steichen as a mercurial figure whose images as well as career bridged multiple genre and parts respectively and, in so doing, anticipated by what mode photography would come to be viewed in the postmodern era. [1] Despite the fact that Steichen's photographs have been part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection since 1933 and that Steichen himself was the director of the Photography Department at the Museum of recent Art, he had been supposeed by most photography historians as les worthy a figure than Alfred Stieglitz. As a celebrity photographer committed to the photo essay, Steichen was tainted by means of commercialism. Regardless of his meteoric advancement in the photography field in the early twe ntieth hundred he was not included in the 1913 Armory display In fact, scholars in art history doctoral programs did not revolve to Steichen until the late 1980s

What has shifted is that cultural critics are now quite used to the idea of candidly discussing art in light of the consumer vortex, the swirl of all things plucked into and being generated without of consumer culture. Now that his relationship to a consumer tillage is no longer stigmatizing, Steichen is not solitary allowed into the conversation on the other hand presents a lively topic. His early training at a commercial lithography company is seen as prescient rather than tawdry. His talent at public relations is a type for the successful American artist, not a detriment Being provocative in the field is not to assert the sanctity of fine art photography (as Stieglitz did) on the other hand to embrace the medium in all of its "discursive spaces" (as Steichen did). Critical theory and cultural criticism of the last 15 years, particularly the genre of essay assembleed in Richard Bolton's The debate of Meaning (1989) has allowed an easy reentry for Steichen. What is uneven is that none of this history is acknowledged in this novel monograph.

The story that Smith run overs is the familiar one about an important mover and shaker who in the early twentieth hundred held great promise. The core narrative starts with Steichen's years as an apprentice at The American Fine Arts Company in Milwaukee and terminates just before World War I when he directed an aerial reconnaissance unit for the United States Army.

plenteous of the text is devot to describing Steichen's impressively energetic and resourceful careerism. Smith identifies Steichen's "gifts as a social pollinator and his infectious beatification and stamina among others at the top of their game." During his first stay in Paris in 1900-02 for example, while ostensibly pursuing painting, he made a auspicious business out of photographing famous artists and writers like as Auguste Rodin and Maurice' Maeterlinck. In discussing Steichen's photography, Smith, unlike Dennis Longwell in Edward Steichen: The Symbolist Period (1978) does not glance at a unified style or aesthetic defining Steichen's oeuvre Smith keeps to take Steichen's photography more upon a case by case basis. His descriptions are marked by the agency of literary flare free of academic jargon as in this poetic passage describing Steichen's photograph of the Flatiron Building:

In aesthetic and in allegorical limits Steichen's is the cosmopolitan Flatiron: London and Venice (a silhouetted horse and cab, adrift upon the wide wet canal of Broadway) face the coming night, oblivious to the astonishing bow of a skyscraper breaking its way above the horizon.

What is disappointing about the volume is that it reaffirms the of advanced age story of Steichen as a failed modernist and extreme points on a melancholy note: Steichen missed the boat He at no time really rode the seas of high Modernism flat though he was there when everyone was boarding. Smith concludes

Steichen's farewell from the Mauretania--the first, greatest in quantity intimate sounding of the widening gap between [Stieglitz and Steichen]--seems a sadder and truer ending than the later, barely political differences brought by the war, because it with equal reason forcibly describes, symptom by symptom, the death of a decade in modem agriculture when energy and analysis, color and form, omament and abstraction, "paintre and fotographer," had joined hands and flown toward a time to come that would never happen.

To make a renewed claim for Steichen single has to be free from the judgement of canonical Modernism. individual has to consider what he did do, not what he did not do. For better or worse, he established a significant antecedent for the American photographers who have since pursu the couple fine art and commercial work of that kind as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Bruce Weber. [2]