Pamela Colman Smith and Alfred Stieglitz

Abstract

Abstract In the Beinecke Library's Alfred Stieglitz Archive is a group of letters written to Stieglitz between 1907 and 1909 by Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951), an American feminist painter-illustrator of mixed Anglo-American and AfroCaribbean descent.1 Despite marginalization by most scholars, Smith's Symbolist art and her presence as the only woman of colour in the Stieglitz circle provide a fuller understanding of what has been central in Stieglitz studies: his modernism. In early 1907, Stieglitz gave Smith the first non-photographic exhibition at his gallery ‘291’: 72 mystical, Symbolist watercolours that Smith told him she painted ‘automatically’ — that is, without conscious control — claiming simply to record passively the hermetic visions that came to her unbidden when she listened to music (a crossing of aural and optical sensation called synaesthesia) (figures 1 and 2). Both this ‘automatism’ and Smith's Symbolist subjects — strange goddesses, zodiacal symbols, star-crossed lovers, ancient heroes...