Jacob Burckhardt, Clive Bell and the ‘Equivalents’ of Alfred Stieglitz

Abstract

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) produced his well-known cloud photograps over a period of more than a dozen years, beginning in the 1922 and continuing until nearly the end of his carrer as a photographer. Initially he gave them musical titles, first ‘Equivalent’. These pictures were first shown under that title in the ‘Seven Americans’ exhibition at the Anderson Galleries in 1925, a show that also included the work of Arthur Dove, MArsden Hartley, John MArin, Charles demuth, Paul Strand and Georgia O'Keeffe. In the years that followed, Stieglitz produced hundreds of such images, and he continued to call them ‘Equivalents’ In time, he applied that term not only to his cloud imagery, but to all, or virtually all, of his pictures, as well as to art more generally. 1