SMITH'S STEICHEN.

Edward Steichen: The Early Years

Joel Smith 

Princeton, NJ and New York, NY: Princeton University Press in association with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1999 167pp./$ 60.00 (hb)

Joel Smith's monograph Edward Steichen: The Early Years is a beautifully written addition to the literature on Edward_Steichen and recommended for readers both unfamiliar with and knowledgeable about his work. However, on a scholarly level it fails to take advantage of important new ideas in current research that reposition Steichen as a mercurial figure whose images as well as career bridged multiple genres and roles respectively and, in so doing, anticipated how photography would come to be viewed in the postmodern era. [1] Despite the fact that Steichen's photographs have been part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art collection since 1933 and that Steichen himself was the director of the Photography Department at the Museum of Modern Art, he had been deemed by most photography historians as less worthy a figure than Alfred Stieglitz. As a celebrity photographer committed to the photo essay, Steichen was tainted by commercialism. Regardless of his meteoric advancement in the photography field in the early twe ntieth century, he was not included in the 1913 Armory Show. In fact, scholars in art history doctoral programs did not turn to Steichen until the late 1980s.

What has shifted is that cultural critics are now quite used to the idea of candidly discussing art in light of the consumer vortex, the swirl of all things pulled into and being generated out of consumer culture. Now that his relationship to a consumer culture is no longer stigmatizing, Steichen is not only allowed into the conversation but presents a lively topic. His early training at a commercial lithography company is seen as prescient rather than tawdry. His talent at public relations is a model for the successful American artist, not a detriment Being provocative in the field is not to assert the sanctity of fine art photography (as Stieglitz did) but to embrace the medium in all of its "discursive spaces" (as Steichen did). Critical theory and cultural criticism of the last 15 years, particularly the genre of essay collected in Richard Bolton's The Contest of Meaning (1989) has allowed an easy reentry for Steichen. What is odd is that none of this history is acknowledged in this new monograph.

The story that Smith tells is the familiar one about an important mover and shaker who in the early twentieth century held great promise. The core narrative starts with Steichen's years as an apprentice at The American Fine Arts Company in Milwaukee and concludes just before World War I when he directed an aerial reconnaissance unit for the United States Army.

Much of the text is devoted to describing Steichen's impressively energetic and resourceful careerism. Smith identifies Steichen's "gifts as a social pollinator and his infectious joy and stamina among others at the top of their game." During his first stay in Paris in 1900-02, for example, while ostensibly pursuing painting, he made a successful business out of photographing famous artists and writers such as Auguste Rodin and Maurice' Maeterlinck. In discussing Steichen's photography, Smith, unlike Dennis Longwell in Edward Steichen: The Symbolist Period (1978), does not suggest a unified style or aesthetic defining Steichen's oeuvre. Smith tends to take Steichen's photography more on a case by case basis. His descriptions are marked by literary flare free of academic jargon as in this poetic passage describing Steichen's photograph of the Flatiron Building:

In aesthetic and in allegorical terms, Steichen's is the cosmopolitan Flatiron: London and Venice (a silhouetted horse and cab, adrift on the wide wet canal of Broadway) face the coming night, oblivious to the astonishing prow of a skyscraper breaking its way over the horizon.

What is disappointing about the book is that it reaffirms the old story of Steichen as a failed modernist and ends on a melancholy note: Steichen missed the boat He never really rode the seas of high Modernism even though he was there when everyone was boarding. Smith concludes,

Steichen's farewell from the Mauretania--the first, most intimate sounding of the widening gap between [Stieglitz and Steichen]--seems a sadder and truer ending than the later, merely political differences brought by the war, because it so forcibly describes, symptom by symptom, the death of a decade in modem culture when energy and analysis, color and form, omament and abstraction, "paintre and fotographer," had joined hands and flown toward a future that would never happen.

To make a renewed claim for Steichen one has to be free from the judgements of canonical Modernism. One has to consider what he did do, not what he did not do. For better or worse, he established a significant precedent for the American photographers who have since pursued both fine art and commercial work such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn and Bruce Weber. [2]

The superior reproductions in Edward Steichen: The Early Years are rich and subtle in tone. Most of the images are given generous borders in keeping with original exhibition and publication practices, so the five images that are laid out across the gutter of the book are unnecessary and visually irksome. In the end, Edward Steichen: The Early Years, with 46 pages of text and 58 color plates, is a stunning picture book. While Smith may not reinvent Steichen, his fine writing superbly complements the moody stylishness of the photographs.

LUCY BOWDITCH is Assistant Professor of Art History at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.

NOTES

(1.) At the most recent College Art Association conference (New York City, February 23-26, 2000), Geoffrey Batchen read a paper entitled "Becoming Photography: Toward a Vernacular History," in which he argued for creating histories of photography that would allow meaningful study of many genres that currently escape consideration, such as small anonymous photographs made as part of jewelry. He called for a "vemacular semiology of the photographic" or "photogrammatology." The impulse to explore the world of photographs beyond what Batchen calls "proper photographs" runs parallel to Steichen's stepping from one world of photography to another being motivated by the life of photography, not a preconceived notion of what photography should be.

(2.) Attention to the methodology of Steichen scholar Patricia Johnston, who is not cited and in 1998 published Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen's Advertising Photography, might have been helpful.