City Seer: Alfred Stieglitz Circa 1900

Abstract

Stieglitz’s sapling rises over the rain-bathed pavement near Madison Avenue and Twenty-Third Street (Fig. 1), one block south from the site of the Flatiron Building, to rise two years later.1 With its calligraphy of limbs and small bird resting in the spray of leaves, the sapling embodies New York’s promise, its budding attractiveness, as Stieglitz understands it. The city is otherwise smudged and evaded: the formless structures on either side are not pictured so much as sketched, plotted, suggested; this is not a city but the idea of one, the premonition of one. ... All of this is hard to see. In the October 1911 edition of Camera Work, a decade after capturing it, Stieglitz curated a half-truth for his image: he contrived to print Spring Showers familiarly near Picasso’s Standing Female Nude (Fig. 2), a charcoal sketch composed chandelierlike of line, jag, and crescent.2 That same year, Stieglitz had ranked Picasso as ‘the man that is counting’ and sought to recast and ally his past work accordingly, transmuting subject matter into pretence for shape and line. This has resulted in gymnastic formal comparisons between the two images, and familiar claims about Stieglitz’s vanguardism.3 He was, one photohistorian advances, ‘less concerned with portraying a topical subject than with creating a contemplative mood’, and, according to another, ‘committed to the transformation of an interior rather than an exterior landscape’.4 Yet the choice between these is a false one; they were inseparable at a time when reformers sought formal solutions to social problems, when it was ‘felt more and more that the city should be a work of art’, as the progressive Richard Theodore Ely announced in The Coming City (1902).5