Chapter 35

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THE LANCET • Vol 357 • March 10, 2001 811

Modern art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and his New York gal- leries An exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 20565 USA, showing until April 22, 2001 Exhibition can be visited on the web at www.nga.gov

Alfred Stieglitz and 20th-century art in America

I have always been a revolutionist”, proclaimed Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), in summing up his

legendary career as a photographer, writer, publisher, gallery director, and art promoter. Born in the USA, he studied photography in Berlin in the 1880s, and is remembered today primar- ily for his photographs of early 20th- century American life and later studies of his wife, the artist Georgia O’Keeffe. However, Stieglitz’s other significant contributions to American art are not so well known. This exhibition of over 100 works by artists he promoted and encouraged gives a first comprehensive look at his galvanizing influence on mod- ern art in America, recreating shows in a succession of his own intimately sized New York galleries from 1905–1946.

In his first gallery, called “291” after its Fifth Avenue address, Stieglitz sought to promote photogra- phy as a new art form and initiate a dialogue between European and American artists. He displayed his own work and innovative photographs by Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and many European photographers. As the concept of “artistic photography” began to be accepted, Stieglitz advanced the theory that photography had eliminated the need for representational art in other media. Proceeding from that conviction, he sought to provoke and inspire American artists mired in 19th- century conventions by giving them a first glimpse of the radical nonrepre- sentational paintings and drawings of such artists as Matisse, Cézanne, and Picasso, all of whom had their first American exhibits at 291.

In his periodical, Camera Work, Stieglitz created a forum for discussion of these pioneering artists, with articles by artists and critics pas- sionately debating the unconventional art forms.

Step-by-step in chronological order, this exhibition recreates the history of Stieglitz’s galleries: First, the shocking and sensual female nudes drawn by

Rodin, Matisse, and Picasso, alongside Stieglitz’s photographs of New York City architecture, the steerage compart- ment of an immigrant ship, and city streets of quaint townhouses dwarfed by towering skyscrapers under construc- tion. Later, broadening the boundaries of art even further, beyond photography, he juxtaposed African sculptures with Brancusi abstract heads and a wasp’s nest. Emboldened rather than dismayed by the stormy reaction to this unprece- dented combination, he then displayed the strident abstract images, filled with symbols and garish reds, blues, and blacks, of Marsden Hartley, a painter encouraged and financially assisted by Stieglitz. Leading his gallery visitors further into experimentation, he featured the abstract watercolours of Manhattan’s skyline by John Marin, the caricatures of modern machinery by Francis Picabia, and Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal set on its side. These

radical new artistic forms and subjects generated shock, excitement and, often, revulsion, leading to heated discussions in print and in Stieglitz’s galleries, where he presided every day, a voluble evangelist to artists, patrons, critics, or anyone else he could collar.

Stieglitz’s galleries were the primary American venue for the multifaceted artistic explosion taking place in Europe until the historic 1913 New York Armory show, in which the American art establish- ment put its stamp of approval on the modern European art Stieglitz had been championing for so many years. The Armory show was a turning point in Stieglitz’s focus as an impresario. A growing American awareness of European modern art meant less need for Stieglitz to pro- vide exposure for it in his galleries. Conventional sensibility had caught up with the leader. A restless intellec- tual provocateur, wanting to be first in defying traditions and never interested in commercial success, he closed 291 and concentrated his attention on stimulating and promoting young American artists,

Marsden Hartley, Abstraction (Military Symbols) (1915)

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Alfred Stieglitz, 291 (1915)

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812 THE LANCET • Vol 357 • March 10, 2001

DISSECTING ROOM

written in a recognisable form (abcb quatrains, with alternating tetrametres and trimetres). In London magazine, Michael O’Neill wrote, “Billy’s rain reinvents the masculine love lyric for a post-modern age”. This, for me, misses the mark. Williams seems to be resisting lyricism—for fear that it might add an anaestheticising gloss to what is a candid account of a frequently painful experi- ence. “Legend” is perhaps the most lyri- cal poem in the collection; yet two of its three rhymes are only half rhymes—as if Williams flinched from creating the wholehearted music of full rhymes.

Despite the understatement of the language, and the affair’s downbeat—at times, almost seedy—style, there is a theatrical quality to the lovers’ behav- iour, a histrionic self-awareness. This could be the key to understanding the collection’s cryptic title. “Billy’s rain”, we are told in the title poem, is the artifi- cial rain used by film crews because real rain “doesn’t show up on film”. It is as if the lovers are playing out roles; as if the dramatic quality in their conduct is intended to glamourise the affair and aggrandise themselves— to make themselves, and the affair, “show up”.

Yet, to Williams’ credit, this histrionic tendency in no way makes us despise the lovers; nor does it diminish our sense of the lovers’—and especially the speaker’s—suffering after the break-up. For all its irony and cool observation, Billy’s rain is a moving and memorable collection, with deceptive emotional depth beneath its flip, colloquial idioms.

Daniel Davies [email protected]

Billy’s rain, the fifth collection ofpoems by English poet and journalist Hugo Williams, might easily have been a novel. The collection tells a story; there are scenes; there are characters; and there is dialogue. Despite its brevity, Billy’s rain tells the story as satisfyingly as any work of fiction. The collection is the kind that makes me feel that the novel is hardly needed: a dead form, perhaps, after all.

Billy’s rain is an account of an extra- marital affair, recalled after the affair has ended. The poems are written in the first-person, and spoken by the man in the relationship. Some of the poems are addressed directly to the woman (as in Ted Hughes’s Birthday letters); others are the man’s recollections, interwoven with his thoughts and feelings. What forms during the collection is a complete picture and examination of the love affair—and an exploration of the emotions felt by the speaker in its course: anxiety, happiness, guilt; and, finally, pain and jealousy.

“Sealink” describes the meeting of the lovers. Its tone is typical of the collection as a whole. There is no weak-kneed sense of fate, of romantic predestina- tion; these are no star-crossed lovers. The tone is sober, matter-of-fact, frank about the element of randomness: “On the boat,/we foot passengers/were shuffled like a pack of cards/and thrown down in new combinations.”

Williams is not a symbolist. If all writing, as the Russian formalists had it,

falls somewhere on a spectrum that has metaphor and metonymy at each end, Williams’ poetry falls at the metonymy end—the representation of the whole by the part. His great gift is to make the whispered detail speak volumes. So judiciously are these details chosen, and so precise is Williams’ language, that each poem is like a chapter in a novel—or a scene in a play or film—that has been distilled into the briefest possible expression.

He is particularly good—and coruscatingly honest—on the self-doubt involved in love: “I gave her a kiss/… checking my smile/in the mirror in the hall/against my chances of being liked” (“My Chances”). What emerges from the poems so early, and so powerfully, is a sense of cost—as if the speaker is paying the emotional price of the affair before it has even started. This feeling might result from the retrospective awareness that the affair comes to an end; it might derive from an instinctive sense, at the time, that the relationship was doomed. Either way, Billy’s rain is not a rapt celebration of human love; from the beginning, it is a lament to love’s decay.

Yet there is joy in the collection. The happiness expressed, without irony, in “Till Soon” is all the more poignant for emerging from a tone that is prevailingly melancholic. In “Legend”, the joy of the affair, more typically, is tempered by wistfulness. This poem is also the only one of the 51 in the collection that is

The end of the affair Billy’s rain Hugo Williams. London: Faber and Faber, 2000. Pp 53. £7·99. ISBN 0571200869.

particularly Georgia O’Keeffe, who swept into his life in 1918. His photos of her during their early courtship and marriage, and his resounding commit- ment to her works, brought a renewed passion and energy to Stieglitz’s own photographic endeavours.

In 1925, Stieglitz opened a new gallery highlighting “Seven Americans” he would champion for the rest of his life: O’Keeffe, Hartley, Marin, Strand, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, and himself. Using new materials, such as Dove’s mixed media collages of metal, twigs, cloth, and string, and the strong iconic forms of modern America, such as Demuth’s depiction of the majesty of rural grain silos in My Egypt, these artists were pivotal innovators of the first half of the 20th century in American art, absorbing and reinterpreting the philosophy and experimentation of their European counterparts. Stieglitz urged them to concentrate on American

subjects and landscapes, and gave each of them solo exhibitions at his galleries. He also served as their dealer, promoter, financial angel, and emotional supporter, nurturing the talents he helped unleash.

Although the art originally displayed in Stieglitz’s galleries, as recreated in this exhibit, was not always the best work of these individual artists, the restless excitement and challenge of their endeavours is convincingly and cumulatively conveyed as one proceeds through the show. This exhibition succeeds memorably in showing how, through foresightful artistic judgment, fervent promotional skills, and intellectually-charged defiance of artistic tradition, Stieglitz thrust American art into the unexplored possibilities of the 20th century.

Wanda Reif [email protected] Picabia, Faith and Love (1915)

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