A glance through the new volume “Steichen’s Legacy” could lead one to believe that Edward Steichen did everything in modern photography. And he did it with a sumptuous luster: turn-of-the-century experiments with a brooding impressionism, razor-sharp Hollywood portraits, the gleaming modernism of New York cityscapes, Waldenesque musings on ponds and woods, intimate still lifes with dying sunflowers.
“He loved to be first, to attract attention,” says Joanna Steichen, his widow and the author and editor of “Steichen’s Legacy” (Alfred A. Knopf). “Partly it was survival — to make a living as a photographer, he had to attract attention. But he also had a passion for discovery. He wanted to try out any new advance in photography. He had a profound faith in progress and technology.”
Steichen is speaking from New York City, where, in addition to the release of “Steichen’s Legacy,” the Whitney Museum of American Art is opening a large exhibition of his work, “Edward Steichen.”
The Howard Greenberg Gallery will open a second exhibition later this month, and Bergdorf Goodman department store will devote its Fifth Avenue window displays to his celebrated images.
Whether or not this confluence of openings is mostly cross-promotional timing, it’s still true that “Steichen’s Legacy” is the first full-fledged overview of the master photographer’s work in nearly 40 years.
Steichen’s passion for discovery is evident in the variety of print stocks and darkroom techniques throughout the book: hand-toned gravures, gum platinum prints, autochromes, dye transfer prints, two- and three-color separations.
He is probably best known for his epic, black-and-white snapshots of the high and the mighty in the ’20s and ’30s. When he turned to such commercial work, Steichen pretty much invented the Vanity Fair house style of glossy portraiture: the celebrity as heroic sculpture.
But it’s also characteristic of his work that one of his most famous early images, “The Flatiron Building, Evening,” taken in 1905, exists in three different-colored prints from the same negative, plus a later black-and-white version. For all of the fixed grandeur of his photographs, for all of their sense of finish, the book’s captions reveal a restless spirit.
Edward Steichen died in 1973, just short of his 94th birthday. His career spans much of the development of 20th Century photography, from the first popular Eastman Kodak box cameras (he bought a second-hand one in 1895) onward.
“He had five or six careers,” Steichen says. “He plunged into anything he did.”
Nevertheless, there’s a Japanese-print-like stillness that marks much of his work, no matter its subject or technique.
“He was always after clarity and precision,” she says. “His sense of composition was an innate talent, but it took him years of practice to learn how to do that with a camera.”
With such clarity and precision comes elegance, and it’s easy to see how, to make a living in the ’20s, Steichen was able to move from “fine art” photography to commercial work for upscale magazines and advertisers.
This kind of crossover — from the avant-garde Little Gallery (later called 291 for its street address on Fifth Avenue) to the pages of Vogue — became commonplace in the careers of such shutterbugs as Richard Avedon and Irving Penn. But at the time it contributed to Steichen’s break with Alfred Stieglitz. Steiglitz had invited the younger photographer to join his Photo-Secession Group and collaborated with him in running 291, bringing to New York the work of European artists such as Rodin, Cezanne, Braque and Brancusi.
“They disagreed about the uses of photography,” his widow says.
Having fought together for photography’s acceptance as a serious art, the two pioneers fell out over what that art should do (as well as over America’s role in World War I). Stieglitz, who had studied in Germany, believed in the purity of the singular print and not in mass duplication. Or in advertising.
“Stieglitz never had to earn a living,” Steichen points out. “Or go to war. World War I affected Edward deeply. He came out feeling that `art for art’s sake’ was insular and self-absorbed. He was driven to say something, to have a positive effect.”
Photography’s best purpose, he believed, was to “explain mankind to itself,” but it’s clear that most of his explanations were uplifting, reducing, idealizing. He didn’t particularly prize the camera’s ability to capture off-the-cuff reality. You rarely find the social grit, the fleeting moment or the beauty-of-the-ugly as in Walker Evans, Andre Kertesz or the early Bill Brandt. Photojournalism didn’t seem to interest Steichen much, and despite his extensive service in two World Wars, combat photography is another 20th Century genre he didn’t dominate.
“In both wars, he headed up photo units,” Steichen explains. “In World War I in France, it was Army aerial photography. But in World War II, he was over 60; he was not supposed to be in a war zone.”
Still, as commander of all Navy combat photography, he managed to get aboard the U.S.S. Lexington during military operations in the South Pacific. For his work, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal.
When he published a volume after the war, Steichen says, he showcased the work of the other photographers from his unit, not his own work. This was an essential paradox in him. Competitive and driven, he also had a “large and generous spirit,” she says. He proudly directed the photography department of the Museum of Modern Art for years, promoting the work of other artists and frequently collaborating with them, notably in “The Family of Man” exhibition in 1955, which toured 69 countries (although critics charged it with sentimentality).
It was four years after that international success that Joanna Taub met the photographer at a luncheon — in the company of his brother-in-law, the poet Carl Sandburg. An advertising writer for Young & Rubicam, she had been working with Sandburg on a promotion for American Airlines when she arranged to meet Steichen. She was 21; he was 80, but he “crackled with energy,” she writes in “Steichen’s Legacy.”
She became his third wife in less than a year.
“I was so naive,” Steichen says, softly chuckling. “I had not had much experience with big over-achievers. During the courtship, he was so wonderful. I expected our marriage to be a meeting of equals. He’d work in his studio, and I’d have time for my own work as a free-lance writer.
“So I was shocked to learn that that wasn’t what he had in mind. One day after the wedding, it was `Let’s get down to helping me with my work.’ And he was serious!”
Not a subject in “Steichen’s Legacy,” Steichen modestly claims that she doesn’t appear in many of his photos because she wasn’t a beautiful model like his first two wives. But it also seems the spirited young woman wasn’t going to be just another one of his subjects, posed and lit.
