Alfred Stieglitz Photos at Seaport Museum, New York - report & video

Exhibition now showing:

Alfred Stieglitz's Photographs, Seaport Museum, New York - from September 14, 2010 to January 10, 2011.

Left Image: Alfred Stieglitz in 1902. Photo by Gertrude Kasebier.

"New York Museum Shows Steiglitz Photographs"

(reprinted article by Peter Fedynsky | New York City │ 17 September 2010, from VOA News)

Alfred Stieglitz is considered a central figure in the history of photography. He lived most of his life in New York and in the early years of the 20th century documented the city's transformation into a grand metropolis. But Stieglitz's New York also conveys a sense of loneliness at odds with the city's image of hustle and bustle.

The exhibit at New York's Seaport Museum brings together 39 Stieglitz photographs for the first time since he displayed them nearly 80 years ago.

Stieglitz is considered a giant in photography. He pushed the technical limits of the young medium during the early decades of the 20th century. Curator Bonnie Yochelson says Stieglitz worked when the camera was still a primitive instrument. "It was his personal goal to do things that nobody else tried to do, like photographing at night, photographing in stormy conditions, or in rainy conditions, or at dawn or at dusk under very difficult lighting conditions," she said.





Stieglitz was born in 1864. He played a pivotal role in turning the medium into an art form and in promoting the work of other photographers and painters of that period. Yochelson says Stieglitz's own work expressed profound loneliness. "He was a man of deep romantic emotions, so his New York -- especially in his early pictures, well in all of his pictures -- don't really capitalize on the bustle and hustle and energy of New York, as much as New York as a place that expresses his feeling of loneliness," she said.


Image: Alfred Stieglitz's photograph titled "The Terminal" taken in 1893.

One of his most famous images, taken in 1893, captures the loneliness -- of a coachman in a snowstorm. Stieglitz said he waited - alone - for three hours to capture it. "One of the secrets to that picture is that it's cropped. It was actually a horizontal picture and there were people on either side of the street and he cropped it into a vertical that eliminated those people," said Yochelson.

Stieglitz also documented New York as skyscrapers first rose in its midst, never venturing far from his Manhattan apartment and sometimes shooting his photographs through his apartment window.

Bonnie Yochulson says New York was a pioneer among modern cities. She says people everywhere can recognize the spirit of commerce and progress captured by Alfred Stieglitz. The exhibit runs through mid January, 2011.

Source: VOA News

Link to Alfred Stieglitz Exhibition at Seaport Museum, New York.

See the following Stieglitz photographs:

Alfred Stieglitz's photograph titled 'Winter on Fifth Avenue' dated 1892.

'Old and New New York' dated 1910 by Alfred Stieglitz.

'Going to the Start' dated 1904 by Alfred Stieglitz.

'A Snapshot of Paris' dated 1911 by Alfred Stieglitz.

Photograph of 'Georgia O'Keefe', 1918, by Alfred Stieglitz.

Photo of 'Ellen Koeniger, Lake George, 1916' by Alfred Stieglitz.

'Venetian Canal (also known as 'A Bit of Venice'), 1897, by Alfred Stieglitz.

'Katherine',1905, by Alfred Stieglitz.

Alfred Stieglitz's photograph titled 'The Hand of Man' dated 1902.

See Rare Art by Renowned American Artist Georgia O'Keeffe at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C.

New exhibit highlights rarely seen abstractions by Georgia O'Keeffe: February 6 - May 9, 2010

Thought I'd share this good news article and video with you from VOA News.

Be sure to watch the video ... plenty of good images of O'Keefe's abstractions ... click on the <> symbol to copy the video onto your clipboard or to paste the HTML code to your site or to share. Enjoy!

Source: VOA News (30 April 2010, Julie Taboh | Washington, DC) - "Rare Art by Renowned American Artist Goes on Display"

Georgia O'Keeffe is one of the most distinguished American artists of the 20th century. She is best known for her vibrant paintings of flowers, leaves, landscapes and other images in nature.

Now, a new exhibit at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., features more than 100 paintings, drawings and watercolors by O'Keeffe and 12 photographic portraits of her taken by her late husband, famed photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

But the highlight of the collection - which includes items dating from 1915 to the late 1970s - includes a rare selection of O'Keeffe's less familiar abstract art.

Georgia O'Keeffe as abstract artist

Georgia O'Keeffe is best known for her sensuous paintings of flowers and desert landscapes of the American southwest. But many people may not know that she was also a gifted abstract artist.

The new exhibit features abstractions that O'Keeffe herself didn't exhibit in her own lifetime, says Elsa Smithgall, associate curator at The Phillips Collection.

According to Smithgall, O'Keeffe broke into abstraction with a set of charcoal drawings that she created in 1915.

"They are exquisite gestural drawings, very organic in form, and no recognizable reference to a known subject," she says.

Water colors and oils

By the 1920s, O'Keeffe had moved on from pure abstract drawings to water colors and oil paintings of subjects that seem more familiar.

But according to Smithgall, O'Keeffe continued to use abstraction as the foundation in all her artwork.

"You're going to find in her work this constant back and forth between very purely abstract form and perhaps a flower or a leaf or a landscape," she says.



Sexual overtones

It was also during this period when critics described O'Keeffe's oil paintings as being sexually suggestive.

While Smithgall acknowledges that some of O'Keeffe's forms do evoke sexual connotations, she emphasizes that the exhibition "is not about that."

She adds that O'Keeffe herself passionately resisted the notion that her art was sexually suggestive and, in fact, made a concerted effort "to shift her focus in her work towards more recognizable subject matter as a way to try to steer the critics towards another kind of reading of her work."

New Mexico - a new chapter

Beginning in 1929, O'Keeffe started spending time in New Mexico where she felt more at home than she had in New York where her career had taken root. Her experiences in the vast open spaces of the New Mexico desert inspired her to move there permanently in 1949.

According to Smithgall, it was a new chapter in her career:

"She's very much responding to that ocean of space in New Mexico where they have this amazing clarity of light and very wonderful, breathtaking kind of exhilarating sensation that she feels there that is extremely inspiring to her, and it brings up a whole new body of subject matter," she says.

It was during these transformative years when her paintings took on a different feel as well, says Smithgall.

O'Keeffe started depicting flowers "increasingly large in format and increasingly greater in magnification and so you start to see a major change in her scale, in her viewpoint taking these unusual birds and bees-eye perspectives," she says.

According to Smithgall, O'Keeffe created magnified images of her subject matter as a way of "inviting the viewer in." She wasn't copying an object so much as expressing how she felt about painting it, she says.

Coming full circle

By the late '50s and '60s, O'Keeffe's art turned once again to the pure abstractions of her earlier years.

"This is not a work that you probably would see on the wall and say, 'Oh, yes, an O'Keeffe,'" says Smithgall, "so there's that surprising aspect to them."

"What's so exquisite about them is that she has - with very spare compositions - created these exquisite forms that are extremely expressive and that do recall those earliest charcoal drawings in that respect," she says.

From those early charcoal drawings to the huge, bold canvases of her later years, few would argue that the work of Georgia O'Keeffe has had a far-reaching influence on American art and culture, and continues to impress and inspire art lovers throughout the world.

Source: VOA News (30 April 2010, Julie Taboh | Washington, DC) - "Rare Art by Renowned American Artist Goes on Display"