The Key Set
Nearly right is child’s play.
Alfred Stieglitz, 1919
During the course of his long career, Alfred Stieglitz amassed a large collection of paintings, drawings, photographs, and sculpture by some of the most celebrated artists of the twentieth-century, as well as more than 2,500 of his own mounted photographs. After his death in 1946, his wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, set aside her own work for three years to organize the collection and plan its dispersal. She paid particular attention to the disposition of his photographs, deeming them to be its most important component.
O’Keeffe, in O’Keeffe, “Stieglitz: His Pictures Collected Him,” The New York Times Magazine (11 December 1949), 30.
O’Keeffe first used the term “the key set” in O’Keeffe, “Stieglitz: His Pictures Collected Him,” The New York Times Magazine (11 December 1949), 30. Doris Bry, in conversation with the author, 18 July 2001, has kindly confirmed that O’Keeffe coined the term.
Stieglitz’s letters contain numerous references to his belief that mounting a print was “sometimes the toughest part of picture making.” See Stieglitz to Sherwood Anderson, 7 August 1924 (Newberry Library, Chicago, and Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven). O’Keeffe considered Stieglitz’s mounting and presentation so central to his art that she withdrew her offer to give the Key Set to The Metropolitan Museum of Art when she learned that the curator in charge of photographs intended to trim Stieglitz’s mount boards to fit the sizes of their storage boxes. As she frequently recounted later in her life, when she learned that the Metropolitan did this with all their prints, even their Rembrandts, she replied, “Well, Mrs. Rembrandt wasn’t around to complain” (O’Keeffe in conversation with the author, 13 February 1980). See also Malcolm Daniel, “Photography at the Metropolitan: William M. Ivins and A. Hyatt Mayor,” History of Photography 21:2 (Summer 1997), 110–116.
Doris Bry in Alfred Stieglitz: Photographer [exh. cat., National Gallery of Art] (Washington, 1958), 7, note 2, stated that “the key set consists of the best single original mounted print from every negative made by Stieglitz of which he had kept mounted prints until the time of his death.” More recently, in a letter to the author, 10 September 2001, she explained, “While in general the best print from each negative was selected for the key set, this could not be 100 per cent true in every instance. When variants of interest existed from the same negative—either different photographic papers or variations of one sort or another, almost without exception these were placed in the key set in order that a student of Stieglitz’s photographs might have the greatest possible opportunity to understand the way he worked. There were also a few occasions when O’Keeffe could only carry out her intentions by using prints that were not in the key set, such as her gift of a cloud set to the Phillips Memorial Gallery.” The set of cloud photographs, Equivalents L1–4, also titled Equivalents N1–4, donated by O’Keeffe to the Phillips Collection, contains one photograph, L3 or N3, not in the Key Set. She continued, “In addition, there were occasional instances during the formation of the key set where we deliberately gave the best print to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and/or Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts to honor their role in Stieglitz’s history, rather than to the National Gallery of Art.”
In 1949 O’Keeffe donated 1,269 photographs, along with 50 issues of Camera Work, including 42 photogravures by Stieglitz, and placed 329 portraits of herself on long-term loan. She subsequently gave those in 1980, and in 1990 The Georgia O’Keeffe Foundation gave two remaining portraits of O’Keeffe that were to be included in the Key Set but had been misplaced. O’Keeffe noted that Stieglitz never decided what should be done with his own work or with his collection of paintings, drawings, prints, photographs, and sculptures by American and European modernists (O’Keeffe, “Stieglitz: His Pictures Collected Him,” The New York Times Magazine [11 December 1949], 29). Duncan Phillips suggested she give the photographs to the newly founded National Gallery of Art. She did so because, as she wrote Rich on 18 December 1948, “the institution seems like a peak—something finished—standing alone.” She continued, “Stieglitz worked for the recognition of Photography as a Fine Art—The National Gallery means something in relation to that” (Georgia O’Keeffe letter to Daniel Catton Rich, Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of Chicago).
Including 1,642 photographs, the Key Set is the largest, most complete, cohesive, and systematic collection of Stieglitz’s work, and the only one in existence. O’Keeffe gave smaller collections of duplicate prints to twelve other museums, but none contains more than 180 works (see Notes to the Reader). The Key Set ranges from juvenilia made on an 1886 trip to a resort near Berlin, through Stieglitz’s mature art of the 1920s and 1930s, to the last photographs he took in the summer of 1937, when poor health forced him to stop working. It also displays the diversity of subject matter he explored—genre studies, portraits, landscapes, cityscapes, and a few copies of other works of art and installation photographs—and the variety of printing techniques he employed—platinum, carbon, photogravure, Autochrome, palladium, Satista, and gelatin silver. While more than 470 photographs in the Key Set were made before 1917, Stieglitz’s fully mature work, including 331 portraits of O’Keeffe made between 1917 and 1937, 337 photographs of clouds from 1922 to 1934, and eighty studies of New York from 1927 to 1937, is represented with the greatest strength. Along with the range and variety of the work, the Key Set also reveals, as no other collection does, what the critic Elizabeth McCausland in 1934 called the “appalling logic and consistency” of Stieglitz’s art.
Elizabeth McCausland, “Photographs by Stieglitz Now at An American Place,” The Springfield Sunday Union and Republican (16 December 1934), section E, 6.
Neither the ratio of early to late work nor the connections that can be seen and felt between the two is accidental, nor did O’Keeffe decide them.
There is no evidence that O’Keeffe destroyed any of Stieglitz’s mounted photographs. During his lifetime she found his destruction of prints so disturbing that she rescued many from the trash. She donated this “Waste Basket Collection” to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. A large holding of unmounted photographs, now in a private collection, suggests that she also preserved many “unfinished” works.
Stieglitz rarely sold his photographs. During the 1890s and early 1900s he put prices on some of his work when it was exhibited (see, for example, catalogues for the 1895 London Salon, the 1896 exhibition in Hamburg, and the 1898 exhibition at the National Academy of Design, New York). He sold few examples, however. In 1895 the director of the Belgian Museum of Fine Arts purchased a group of photographs from the “Cercle Artistique et Litteraire, Salon Photographie,” held in Brussels, including Stieglitz’s Scurrying Home (see “A Triumph for Pictorial Photography,” The American Amateur Photographer 8 [January 1896], 26). In 1910 the Albright Art Gallery bought several photographs from its large “International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography,” including Stieglitz’s The Street, Fifth Avenue (see “The International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography of 1910,” in William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession [Boston, 1983], 144–147). Stieglitz gave snapshots to friends and family, and occasionally presented individuals who helped support his galleries with more important works. See, for example, a print of Georgia O’Keeffe—Hands and Thimble, 1919 (Key Set number 566), which was given to Aline Meyer Liebman, and is now in a private collection (Christie’s, New York, auction catalogue, 8 October 1993, lot 80). However, he did so with care: when asked by David Liebovitz if a casual acquaintance had some of his photographs, Stieglitz replied, “No, I have picked out my people with some discretion” (19 July 1929, Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven).
Stieglitz to R. Child Bayley, 9 October 1919 (Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven).
Stieglitz to Paul Strand, 11 August 1919 (Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, and Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, Tucson).
To that end, from the late 1910s through the early 1940s, he repeatedly, as he reported to the painter Arthur Dove, went through his photographs—“and that’s some job”—freely and frequently editing both negatives and prints.
Stieglitz to Arthur Dove, 24 June 1939, as quoted in Ann Lee Morgan, ed., Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove (Newark, Delaware, 1988), 422. Stieglitz’s niece Georgia Engelhard also commented that he was a “perfectionist, satisfied only with the best from himself and others. . . . He has torn up many hundreds of his own prints, discarded thousands of negatives which did not come up to his own standards” in “Alfred Stieglitz: Master Photographer,” American Photography 39 (April 1945), 9.
Stieglitz told Nancy Newhall that he stored his glass plates under a sink at his gallery 291: “When we had to vacate the place, the sink had leaked and 94% had become wet and stuck together. They were thrown away . . . my negatives made in Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland and the Tyrol, negatives in New York of New York—4 × 5 and 8 × 10—even the original prints from most of the negatives no longer extant. They had been either lost or destroyed” (as quoted by Nancy Newhall, unpublished manuscript, 24, copy in NGA files). The losses were certainly exaggerated. As Newhall notes, Stieglitz stored both negatives and prints in several locations and he made many prints in the 1920s and 1930s from negatives made before 1917 when 291 closed.
Stieglitz to Henry McBride, “Correspondence,” New York Herald (10 February 1924), section 7, 13.
Stieglitz to Arthur Dove, 9 September 1929 (Ann Lee Morgan, ed., Dear Stieglitz, Dear Dove [Newark, Delaware, 1988], 178).
Stieglitz to O’Keeffe, 12 June 1932 and 19 May 1932 (Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven). Marmaduke Humphrey in “Triumphs in Amateur Photography, I—Alfred Stieglitz,” Godey’s Magazine 135 (December 1897), 584, reported that Stieglitz had made “twenty thousand negatives, and has smashed about eighteen thousand of these in his annual house-cleanings.” Elizabeth McCausland, “Photographs by Stieglitz Now at An American Place,” The Springfield Sunday Union and Republican (16 December 1934), section E, 6, noted that Stieglitz had made four thousand negatives.
Stieglitz to Sherwood Anderson, 30 November 1925 (Newberry Library, Chicago, and Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven). In the early 1940s Stieglitz made tentative plans to have his photographs catalogued by Nancy Newhall. On 6 July 1942 she wrote in her journal, “Stieglitz agreed immediately that his work should be catalogued and photographed for identification purposes. Had always intended to do it himself, using postage stamp size so works in folders, etc., could be identified from the outside. Was not worried about the Place upset by equipment or loss of quality or anything else. Did not even stick at the publication of the catalogue. Was, in fact, all for the idea.” Little progress was made on the project (see Nancy Newhall, unpublished manuscript, 1, copy in NGA files).
At its core, though, Stieglitz’s editing of his photographs was carefully and sometimes agonizingly deliberate. He matured in a period of dramatic transformation in the arts and he was never taught how to be an artist, much less an artistic photographer, and certainly not a modernist. While he made many critically acclaimed photographs before 1910, many of them were analytical, often didactic, and even reactive, created in response to the ideas and art—especially the paintings—of others. He did not fully clarify what the art of photography entailed and what its relationship to the other arts was until the 1910s, and only then did he become a modern artist—more synthetic, at times intuitive and often highly original. When he began to edit his collection after that, he wanted it to reflect and embody his new and lately won understanding of photography as a modern art. The process was “self-torture,” he told O’Keeffe in the early 1930s, noting that he had filled one room of his gallery, An American Place, with boxes of his photographs and was “looking at every print. It’s an awful order—so few are really complete.”
Stieglitz to O’Keeffe, 18 May 1932 (Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven).
Stieglitz to O’Keeffe, 17 May 1932 (Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven).
Stieglitz to O’Keeffe, 22 May 1932 (Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven).
We do not know exactly what O’Keeffe thought of his job when, after his death, she went through all of his photographs to select those for the Key Set. But she was definitely not presented with a random assortment of odds and ends, as is the case with so many artists’ estates. Nor was she left examples of every negative he had made, every image he had ever printed, or every work he had ever considered worthy of exhibition or reproduction. Many photographs made before 1900, known primarily through reproductions or as lantern slides, are not in the Key Set.
The Key Set includes prints from 169 negatives made before 1900. More than 150 additional works are known through reproduction, as lantern slides, or exist in public and private collections. In recent years some vintage prints of previously unknown works have been discovered. See prints in the Herbert Small Collection, Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona, Tucson (reproduced in Center for Creative Photography 6 [Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs from the Herbert Small Collection] [April 1978]), and photographs exhibited in “Alfred Stieglitz: Early Work,” at the George Eastman House, International Museum of Photography and Film, February–May 1975 (copy prints in George Eastman Museum files). Stieglitz saved many lantern slides, but O’Keeffe did not include them in the Key Set, probably because they were not mounted prints and therefore, in his opinion, not finished works of art.
For reproductions of some of these snapshots, see Sue Davidson Lowe, Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography (New York, 1983), pls. 6–10, 12–14, and 19–20.
Most of these photographs are bound into four albums that Stieglitz titled Sun Prints. Two additional albums are titled A Souvenir of Summer, 1886, and Freienwalde a.O.
The following catalogue presents the photographs in the Key Set in a chronological order that establishes for the first time a picture of the evolution of his art. The construction of this chronology presented many problems. With the exception of the photographs he made on his 1894 trip to Europe and those taken in New York in 1910, the dates assigned to Stieglitz’s works are often arbitrary at best.
Although Stieglitz’s photographs have been extensively discussed in recent years, their titles, dates, and exhibition histories have rarely been systematically examined. One notable exception is Joel Smith, “New York Modernism and the Cityscapes of Alfred Stieglitz, 1927–1937” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2001).
Although Stieglitz amassed an extensive archive now preserved at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, it does not include systematic lists made by Stieglitz of his photographs. Only two of Stieglitz’s negatives, now in a private collection, are known to the author, and neither is currently housed in sleeves that might have contained inscriptions.
Further compounding our understanding of Stieglitz’s evolution, he viewed his negatives as a rich and deep reservoir that he could repeatedly revisit, and throughout his life he frequently rethought and reinterpreted his art. He had no interest in merely repeating what he had already done, but always wanted “a new problem . . . to vary—add.”
Stieglitz, “A Statement,” in Exhibition of Stieglitz Photographs [exh. cat., The Anderson Galleries] (New York, 1921), unpaginated.
“The Hand Camera—Its Present Importance,” The American Journal of Photography and Photographic Times Almanac for 1897 (New York, 1896), 27.
In some cases, he recropped and reprinted earlier photographs that he had previously printed, but in other instances he printed work that he had hardly considered before. By studying the prints themselves and their exhibition and publication histories we can see that Stieglitz did not include Sun Rays—Paula, Berlin, which has come to be thought of as prescient, in either of his one-person shows at the Camera Club of New York in 1899 or his gallery, 291, in 1913, but, most likely, first presented it in his 1921 exhibition at the Anderson Galleries (Key Set numbers
Stieglitz to J. Dudley Johnston, 3 April 1925 (Royal Photographic Society, Bath, England).
The following essay does not retell the story of Stieglitz’s life or his work to promote photography and modern art. Instead, it analyzes what is and is not in the Key Set in order to clarify the evolution of Stieglitz’s understanding of modernist photography and suggest new insights into his sources, working methods, development, and objectives.