Edward Steichen

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Edward Jean Steichen (March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) was a Luxembourgish American photographer, painter, and curator.

His were the photographs that appeared in Alfred Stieglitz's classic magazine Camera Work from 1903 to 1917.

Steichen claimed to his portraits of gowns for the magazine Art et Décoration in 1911, which were the first modern fashion photographs ever published.

Steichen worked for many advertising companies, including J. Walter Thompson, from 1923 to 1938.

Steichen was once considered the country's best-known and highest paid photographer during those years.

He directed the war documentary The Fighting Lady, which received the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Steichen served as the head of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1947 to 1961.

Although he was there, he curated and assembled exhibits, including The Family of Man, which was seen by nine million people.

Early life

Jean Steichen was born in a small house in Bivange, Luxembourg, and the son of Jean-Pierre and Marie Kemp Steichen. When Steichen was eighteen months old, his parents, who were increasingly ill and broke, decided to get back to the United States and start anew. Jean-Pierre Steichen immigrated in 1880, with Marie Steichen carrying the infant Éduard with him after Jean-Pierre settled in Hancock, Michigan's Upper Peninsula copper country. The Steichens were "part of a large exodus of Luxembourgers relocated in the late nineteenth century due to worsening economic circumstances," according to Penelope Niven, a Steichen biographer.

Lilian Steichen, Éduard's aunt and only sibling, was born in Hancock on May 1, 1883. She would marry poet Carl Sandburg, who she encountered at the Milwaukee Social Democratic Party office in 1907. Her marriage to Sandburg in the following year helped to establish a life-long friendship and family partnership between her brother and Sandburg.

When Éduard was ten years old, his parents had saved up enough funds to move the family to Milwaukee by 1889. At school, he learned German and English, but he continued to speak Luxembourgish at home.

Steichen started attending Pio Nono College, a Catholic boys' high school, at fifteen years old, where his artistic talents were discovered. His drawings, in particular, were said to be showing promise. He left high school to begin a four-year lithography apprenticeship with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. He'd sketch and draw for hours, and he'd begin to teach himself painting. He went to a camera store near his work before deciding to buy his first camera, a secondhand Kodak box "detective" camera, in 1895. Steichen and his colleagues, who were both interested in drawing and photography, rented a tiny room in a Milwaukee, Wisconsin office building, and formed the Milwaukee Art Students League. Richard Lorenz and Robert Schade were hired by the company for occasional lectures. Steichen's photographs were on display in Philadelphia's second photographic Salon in 1899.

Steichen became a citizen of the United States and obtained naturalization papers under the name Edward J. Steichen, but he continued to use the term Éduard until the First World War.

Later life

Steichen was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by US President Lyndon B. Johnson on December 6, 1963.

Despite being 88 years old and unable to attend in person, Steichen, a former member of the American Society of Photographers' copyright commission, urged that "this young giant of the visual arts be given equal rights by having its peculiarities taken into account."

In 1968, the Edward Steichen Archive was established in MoMA's Department of Photography. René d'Harnoncourt, the Museum's then-Director, declared that the Museum's primary role was to "amplify and clarify Steichen's contribution to photography, as well as modern art in general." Grace M. Mayer, who began as a research assistant and then became Curator of Photography in 1959, died in 1966. Mayer returned from retirement to work as Curator of the Edward Steichen Archive until the mid-1980s in order to obtain records related to Steichen. The museum's Grace M. Mayer Papers house her detailed card catalogs.

In 1969, Steichen's 90th birthday was marked with a dinner party of photographers, editors, authors, and museum experts. Henry Allen Moe, a MoMA trustee, and the United States hosted the event. Tom Maloney, a camera magazine editor, is the photographer.

During the Rencontres d'Arles festival in 1970, a night show was shown in Arles: "Edward Steichen, photographed" by Martin Boschet.

In 1928, Steichen purchased a farm named Umpawaug, just outside West Redding, Connecticut. He lived there until his death on March 25, 1973, just two days before his 94th birthday. Steichen's farm was turned into a park named Topstone Park after his death. Topstone Park was open seasonally as of 2018.

Steichen was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 1974.

Personal life

Clara E. Smith, 1903–1952) married Steichen in 1903. They had two children, Mary Rose Steichen (1904-1998) and Charlotte "Kate" Rodina Steichen (1908-1988), respectively. Clara accuses her husband of having an affair with artist Marion H. Beckett, who was staying with them in France in 1914. The Steichens left France just before advancing German troops. Clara Steichen and her daughter Kate returned to France in 1915, despite the war's destruction, staying in their house in the Marne. In 1917, Steichen returned to France with the American Army Signal Corps' Photography Division, whereupon Clara returned to the United States. Clara Steichen sued Marion Beckett in 1919 for having an affair with her husband but she was unable to prove her allegations. Clara and Edward Steichen divorced in 1922.

In 1923, Steichen married Dana Desboro Glover. In 1957, she died of leukemia.

Steichen married 27-year-old Joanna Taub in 1960, and remained married to her until his death, two days before his 94th birthday. Joanna Steichen died in Montauk, New York, at the age of 77.

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Career

Steichen moved from Milwaukee to Paris in April 1900 to study art. Clarence H. White felt that Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz should meet, and consequently wrote an introduction letter to Steichen and Steichen, and Steichen, and Steichen — who travelled to Paris from his home in Milwaukee — first met Stieglitz in early 1900. Stieglitz spoke of Steichen's experience in painting and bought three of Steichen's photographic prints in that first meeting.

Steichen, who was designing what would be Camera Work, asked Steichen to design the magazine's logo with a custom typeface, in 1902. Steichen was the most often photographed photographer in the journal.

Steichen began photographing in 1904 and was one of the first in the United States to use the Autochrome Lumière process. Stieglitz and Steichen established the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in 1905 in what had been Steichen's portrait gallery; after that address, it became known as the 291 Gallery. It was one of the first American exhibits of Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso, and Constantin Brâncuşi.

Steichen was one of Europe's oldest "jet setters," moving back and forth between Europe and the United States by steamship, promoting photography as an art form and enhancing American knowledge of European art and art in general, according to author and art historian William A. Ewing.

Engraved engravings were copied from photographs of modishly-dressed actresses by Leopold-Emile Reutlinger, Nadar, and others in the 1890s. After the introduction of high-quality half-tone photography to the art of photography in 1907, Francois Perpetual and Steichen, who borrowed his friend's hand-camera in 1907, candidly photographed dazzlingly-dressed women at the Longchamp Racecourse Fashion in Paris, especially by Frères Séeberger, as it was worn at horse-race meetings by aristocracy and employed models.

Lucien Vogel, the publisher of Jardin des Modes and La Gazette du Bon Ton, challenged Steichen to promote fashion as a fine art by photographing in 1911. Steichen took photos of gowns created by couturier Paul Poiret, which were included in the magazine Art et Décorration's April 1911 issue. Both were in color and appeared in the street next to flat, stylized, yellow-and-black Georges Lepape drawings of accessories, fabrics, and girls.

Steichen claimed in his 1963 autobiography that his 1911 Art et Décoration photographs "weren't possibly the first serious fashion photographs ever made," a generalised assertion that has been repeated by many commentators. What he (and Meyer) did bring was an artistic perspective; a soft-focus, aesthetically retouched Pictorialist style that was distinct from his commercial colleagues' photographic portraits of the garment; and that he and the publishers and fashion designers for whom he worked appreciated as a marketable idealisation of the garment, rather than the precise description of fabrics and buttonholes.

He returned to straight photography for his fashion photography after World War I, during which he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces, and was recruited by Condé Nast in 1923 for the extraordinary salary of $35,000 (equivalent to over $500,000 in 2019).

Steichen, who had been in his sixties at the start of World War II, had left as a full-time photographer. He was exhibiting new varieties of delphinium, which had been on display at the Museum of Modern Art in 1936 and was the first flower exhibition to be held there.

Steichen, who had been serving in the first World War as an Army Colonel, was refused active service due to his age. He was first promoted by the Navy to head the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit in January 1942. Steichen selected six officer-photographers from the field (sometimes incorrectly referred to as "Steichen's chickens"), including photographers Wayne Miller and Charles Fenno Jacobs, who were selected for his unit six officer-photographers from the region (sometimes incorrectly named "Steichen's chickens). At the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, a series of 172 silver gelatin photographs taken by the Unit under his leadership is on display. At the 17th Academy Awards, their war film The Fighting Lady, directed by Steichen, received the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

Steichen curated for the Museum of Modern Art in 1942, producing five copies of which toured the world. Photographs in the exhibition were attributed to enlisted members of the Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps, as well as numbers by Steichen's company, though some were anonymous and some were made by automatic cameras in Navy planes operating while firing at the enemy. This was followed by Power in the Pacific in January 1945: Battle Photographs of Our Navy in Action on the Sea and In the Sky. On December 13, 1945, Steichen was suspended from Active Service (under honorable circumstances). He was promoted to Captain. The World War II Victory Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal (with two campaigners), the American Campaign Medal (with two campaign stars), and several other honors have been given to him for his work during World War II.

In 1929, Museum of Modern Art director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. had included a section devoted to photography in a proposal submitted to the Trustees. Despite not being established in 1940, it became the first department of photography in a museum dedicated to twentieth-century art, and Beaumont Newhall was the first photograph department. Steichen was appointed Director of Photography in 1962 and later assisted by Grace M. Mayer in the case of attendances of his propaganda shows Road to Victory and Power in the Pacific, as well as the departure of most of his staff.

Many who saw him as anti-art photography, including Ansel Adams, one of the most vocal of the art, wrote a letter to Stephen Clark on April 29, 1946, expressing his dissatisfaction with Steichen's selection for the new position of director; "To supplant Beaumont Newhall, who has made such contributions to the art by his deep understanding and sympathy for the medium, which has been inevitably favorable to the development of contemporary photography."

Nonetheless, Ansel Adams' photograph Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, first appeared in the United States. Camera Annual 1943, after being chosen by Steichen, who was acting as a judge for the journal, was selected by Steichen. Moonrise had an audience before its first formal exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1944.

Steichen as director had a strong belief in the local product, "liveness of American photography's melting pot," and sought to expand and organise the collection, inspired by and recalling the 1950s vintage while keeping historical shows to a minimum. He worked with Robert Frank before his The Americans were published, displayed the early work of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind, as well as two Rauschenberg prints in 1952, long before any museum acquired them. Steichen also retained international developments and held shows and made major acquisitions from Europe and Latin America, although occasionally visiting those countries to do so. During his time as Administrator, three books were published (The Family of Man, Steichen the Photographer, and The Bitter Years (1935–1941: Rural America as Seen by the Farm Security Administration photographers). Steichen exhibited his own work at MoMA—his retrospective, Steichen the Photographer—but only after he had already announced his resignation in 1961.

Steichen created The Family of Man, a world-touring Museum of Modern Art exhibition that was arguably a product of American Cold War propaganda, was seen by 9 million visitors and now holds the record for most visited photography exhibitions. Steichen's castle in Clervaux, Luxembourg's country of origin, is now permanently housed and on permanent display. The prologue to Steichen's widely circulated book was published by Carl Sandburg's brother-in-law. There were more than 500 photos depicting life, love, and death in 68 countries. The exhibition was donated to the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, Steichen's birthplace, as had been Steichen's aspiration.

The following are exhibits curated or directed by Steichen during his time as Director of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art.

Grace Mayer, 'overseen' by Steichen, who took the show from Steichen as Assistant Curator, 1960 to 1961), and Walker Evans: American Photographs (June 8, 1962 – February 14, 1963) Added to the collection.

On July 1, 1962, Steichen recruited John Szarkowski to be his successor at the Museum of Modern Art. Mayer was promoted to Curator by Szarkowski after his appointment.

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