Alfred Stieglitz: From nudes to clouds

Abstract

Abstract Alfred Stieglitz was hardly alone in bringing a charged eroticism to his art. Virility and domination were significant themes throughout early twentieth-century vanguard art, and Stieglitz's photographs echo the images of painters such as Matisse or the Fauves, who also depicted faceless nudes with well-delineated breasts or buttocks.1 Other American photographers created in a similar mode, and Edward Weston, for instance, possessed an aesthetic that arose as much from the loins as from the heart. Members of Stieglitz's New York circle also believed that aesthetic and sexual pleasures were closely connected, and Paul Rosenfeld praised Stieglitz's nudes because they were ‘intimate, intense’ and ‘reveal the trend of subterranean streams’.2 Along with Rosenfeld, Matisse and others, Stieglitz held a common conception of the avant-garde artist as both a heroic and lusty creator, a figure whose instincts and intuitions subdued older visual styles — and perhaps his models.