It began with pigs. In 1894, at the age of fifteen, Edward Steichen—or Eduard, as he was christened and still called himself in those days—went to work for the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. Within two years, thanks to his skill as a draftsman, he had risen from unpaid janitor to designer of lithographic prints. Until then, the company had modelled its poster designs on old woodblocks, but Steichen, whose ambitions had hitherto been confined to painting, had a better idea. According to Penelope Niven, the author of “Steichen: A Biography” (Clarkson Potter; $45), the young man had recently acquired his first camera; and thus, in Niven’s moving words, “he took sharp, clear pictures of pigs, which were so appreciated by his company’s clients in the pork-production industry that they demanded that all future advertising lithographs be sketched from Steichen’s actual photographs.”
This was good business for Steichen and bad news for swine. A sharp, clear pig would turn the mind of even the noblest animal lover to helpless thoughts of sausage, whereas a pig that was shrewd enough to stay out of Steichen’s way for a couple of years might have had a chance. By 1897, the photographer had embarked, or stumbled, upon the visual manner for which he remains best known—the mysterious climate that gripped his images as one century died and another came to life. They offer a permanent premonition of winter; even the interior portraits suffer their own particular solstice, as the creeping invasion of shadow appears not so much to stripe and hatch the central figures as to suck them in. Under this bewitching furze of darkness, even the stoutest hog would consist of little more than a dim snout and a curling suggestion of tail.
Steichen’s most celebrated picture from this period—from any period—is that of the Flatiron Building, taken in 1905. Reproduced the following year for the journal Camera Work in tones of deep verdigris, it holds its place among the crucial representations of New York, thanks to a magnificent visual bigotry: impatient of the simple need to capture a view, Steichen chooses to imprison Broadway in the gloom of his imaginings—an oddly thrilling gloom, it must be said, with barely a trace of the morbid. The middle section of the frame is caged by leafless trees, and, though the only wetness we actually see is the reflective slick of the roadway, the air above the carriages feels damp and gauzy with rain, of the invisible kind that plasters hair to skin, and it’s hard to dispel the eerie sensation of a world that is poised to drown. By any standard, this is an astonishing photograph for a young man to have taken—closer to the ruminations of Edith Wharton, say, than to the high spirits and frantic ambitions that one associates with Edward Steichen. No other photographer so determinedly reminds our eyes, as it were, of the stillness of still photography; between the stiff-spined archness that threatened the Victorian portrait and the hasty, freeze-dried moments of modern reportage, only Steichen had the skill, and the wit, to redefine the photograph as a kind of miniature monument, a repository of pensive peace.
He himself, on the other hand, lived and thrived as a professional jitterbug to the age of ninety-three. Between the world wars, for instance, he was in hectic demand as a society photographer, and yet war saw him divert his art without hesitation to the even higher demands of his country: Steichen was as fervent a patriot as you could hope to find in twentieth-century America; so it comes as no surprise to learn that he was born in Luxembourg in 1879. The following year, his father, the useless and occasionally violent Jean-Pierre, travelled to America in search of a better life, and failed signally to find it. When Jean-Pierre’s letters stopped, Edward’s mother, Marie, who was in every respect more capable, wrapped up her belongings, including her baby, and set off in search of her husband. “Chicago, where is this?” she asked, and followed directions. However well trodden the history of the mass European migration to the United. States, it is always invigorating to discover yet one more heroic display of initiative and pluck, and Penelope Niven’s long book is at its most brisk and entertaining in the early chapters, as she details the almost comical confidence of Marie Steichen. In 1889, the family moved from Hancock, Michigan, to Milwaukee, which had practically doubled its population in a decade. By 1890, forty-seven per cent of its citizens were foreign-born, and most of them drank beer. When Niven writes a sentence such as “The Schlitz Brewing Company built spacious Schlitz Park, boasting its own theater, fountains, and menagerie, as well as outdoor opera performances in the summer,” it’s impossible not to be stirred by the sound of brassy civic ideals and, at the same time, by the alarming thought that Milwaukee was essentially Marie Steichen writ large.
Powered by his mother’s industrious high hopes and, for some reason, unimpeded by Oedipal longings, Edward hit the ground at full speed. Before you know it, he is quitting Milwaukee and heading for New York, there to be met by a glorious sight: a six-story warehouse plastered with the advertisement that he himself had designed for Cascarets laxatives. “I decided then and there that New York must be the art center of the world,” he wrote later, having clearly seen, in this unlikely portent, a sign that his career would run and run. Pausing only to make the acquaintance of Alfred Stieglitz—his mentor, fellow-genius, friend, and sometime opponent, and the only person in this book who makes our hero look like a sluggard—Steichen in 1900 sails to Europe, where he finds his true path as an artist, and where Penelope Niven, by no coincidence, loses her way as a writer. “Nearby cabarets pulsed with music, liberated men and women mingled freely; and the air could be wondrously alive with the romance and magic of Paris—or heavy with decadence and distraction.”
To be fair, there is no tolerable way to write about this period. I would suggest that publishers impose a moratorium on any mention of Parisian cultural life in the first quarter of the century were it not for the annoying fact that Edward Steichen, unlike those compatriots who merely thirsted for Bohemia Lite, did prosper and educate himself in this treacherous community. That he hung out with Picasso, Matisse, Rodin, and Brancusi is not surprising; what matters is that his appraisal of their work was so acute and so respectful that they entrusted him with the task of selecting and hanging it in America. 291, the gallery on Fifth Avenue that Steichen and Stieglitz founded, in 1905, showed Rodin’s pale and carnal drawings in 1908, and three years later, according to Niven, “Steichen oversaw in Paris all the arrangements for Pablo Picasso’s first exhibition in the United States, arguably his first major one-man show anywhere.” Niven’s claim that Steichen—as much as Stieglitz, who traditionally gets the credit—was responsible for waking America up to modernism is a compelling one, and if you want to know how Steichen himself profited from the transaction, you need only look at the stern and sumptuous pictures that he took of Rodin and his work. The sculpture of Balzac is forceful enough in the flesh, or in the stone, but Steichen’s photograph makes it more brooding still, adopting a low angle that heightens the figure’s bullish thrust against a drapery of dusk.
You could argue that Steichen lagged a generation behind the modernists he so admired; that his canon of low-lit portraits, far from looking forward, peers back to Sargent and Whistler, offering nothing new. But scrutinize his shot of J. P. Morgan, and you find none of Sargent’s flattering languor; Steichen went at Morgan with an unblinking toughness to match his subject. At the three-minute sitting, he deliberately urged Morgan to adopt an uncomfortable pose and then trapped him in the instant of irritation. The hand that clutches the arm of the chair is that of a man who has a good mind to get up and leave. (Morgan, needless to say, enjoyed the close combat, and immediately gave Steichen five hundred dollars in cash.) Even one of Steichen’s earliest photographs, “Self-Portrait, Milwaukee, 1898,” cuts through its own haze with a diffident wit: an awkward Steichen discomposes himself at the right of the frame, stooping slightly; as if trying to fit the picture. He fails beautifully, losing one leg and cropping his own crown as you would slice off the top of a boiled egg. You can barely make out an expression on his face, although the shape of it—at once broad and acute, like Baudelaire’s—is plain to see, and the hair falls in the lick of a leading man. The only glimmer shines from a polished shoe. Strangest of all, and enjoying pride of place, is a little empty picture frame hanging high on the wall behind Steichen. It’s a gag, of sorts, but it adds a stamp of severity: Is this palely loitering youth suggesting that his image will end up there, like a family memento, or, more critically, that his whole enterprise is a vacant gesture?
What is amazing is that Steichen was toying with such startling visual structures—curt nods, perhaps, toward the off-center domestic scenes of Bonnard—two years before he even went to France. From the start, what set him apart from his contemporaries was this instinctive audacity, an eagerness to intervene in the photographic process if it would help him to entrap the truth. “Whether this intervention consists merely of marking, shading and tinting in a direct print, or of stippling, painting and scratching on the negative, or of using glycerine, brush and mop on a print, faking has set in,” he declared in 1903. “In fact, every photograph is a fake from start to finish.”
You can now revisit the fruits of his falsity in “Camera Work: The Complete Illustrations 1903-1917” (Taschen; $29.99), an eight-hundred-page chunk of images and essays from the elegant quarterly that printed most of Steichen’s masterpieces, culminating in the special Steichen issue of 1906. Camera Work was in essence the house journal of the Photo-Secession, a classy group of American photographers which was founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902 “to advance photography as applied to pictorial expression.” It sounds kind of obvious, and in practice pictorial had a bad habit of drifting into pretty. Place Steichen’s work next to that of other notables—friends of his like Clarence H. White and Gertrude Käsebier—and you realize that, for all the apparent closeness of tone, there is an unbridgeable chasm between Steichen’s sturdy adventures in refinement and the bloodless pastoral of his fellow-Secessionists. Steichen suffered no trace of Pre-Raphaelite hangover. The man with the mop was ready for whatever modernism could throw at him.
There is nothing like a young artistic medium to stir up prophets and promoters, and for sheer hustle only Hollywood in its infancy can match the power play that went on between pioneer photographers. Much of Niven’s book—rather too much—is taken up with the stolid discussions that weighed down photographic societies and journals at the turn of the century as members struggled to decide whether the use of a camera spelled art, craft, or business; the joke was, of course, that the briefest acquaintance with Edward Steichen demonstrated that it involved all three, and more. In 1917, for instance, he joined the Photographic Division of the Army Air Service; by the time of the Armistice, he was heading the entire outfit, and had become a vehement advocate of its strategic contribution. The young man who in quieter days had kicked his own tripod as he made an exposure, inducing a romantic shudder in the focus, was now obliged to reverse the process, and aim for “clear pictures from a vibrating, speeding airplane ten to twenty thousand feet in the air.” Nothing, one might think, could be more rigorous, more immune to beauty, than an aerial photograph taken for military purposes; nevertheless, Lieutenant Colonel Steichen—as he was at the end of the war, and as he continued to list himself in the New York telephone directory—felt free to write about the “striking pictorial effects” of his wartime compositions, and to donate some of them to the Museum of Modern Art.
Still, there is no denying that the fog had lifted from Steichen’s work, and that he was excited by the possibilities of the practical. Stieglitz’s view was that his friend had betrayed the artistic scruples of the Secession. Another, more charitable view is that the scruples themselves rustled into a dead end, and that Steichen was merely keeping up with photography as it moved on. He described Camera Work in its later incarnation as being “about itself” whereas to his mind the world threw up plenty of stuff for photography to be about. It is possible, I think, to hold both views at once; no one could read Niven’s book and not warm to the crammed curiosity of Steichen’s life, but equally one has to admit that it was lived at a cost. In the twenties and thirties, he became one of the most famous and best-paid photographers in the world, and took portraits of those who were similarly blessed: our visions of Garbo, Paul Robeson, and the dapper, detramped Chaplin, to name but a few, are filtered directly through Steichen’s eyes, and it is hard to cavil at the crisp textures and swift dramatic shorthand of his shoots for Vanity Fair. But Steichen was no longer breaking the mold; he was remaking it, and mending the cracks, and smoothing it with his skills.
A valiant effort to revalue that middle career is made by Patricia Johnston, in “Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography” (California; $55). Johnston is a less blurry writer than Penelope Niven, and a more reliable reader of a photograph, but, boy, does she have her work cut out. If you wanted the most flattering shots of Jergens hand lotion, Pond’s cold cream, Pebeco toothpaste, and Scott toilet tissue (“Mother, why am I so sore and uncomfortable?”), then Steichen was your man. Johnston’s insistence that he delved into the contradictions of consumerist society, however, is pitching a little strong. There was the occasional flash of the old courage, as when Steichen chose to promote Cannon towels with a succession of untowelled, shadowy bodies; but even that was no more than a tiptoe over the frontiers of taste, and, as one art director noted, in a brilliant summation of an entire movement in feminist aesthetics, “Women generally do not like photographs of nude women like men do, and women buy the towels.”
Steichen still had a ruthless eye for line, and you can hardly blame him for following that line to where the money was; but for a truly bracing investigation of clarity, try flicking back to the end of the Camera Work anthology. As if to herald a new and uncluttered future, Stieglitz, in his two final editions, had reproduced the cityscapes and portraits of Paul Strand. If Steichen had used the camera as a painter would (once he even photographed himself with brush and palette), Strand treated it like a knife. Steichen, ever the fast learner, soon followed suit, but the younger generation of Strand and Edward Weston was pushing ahead, and there is no avoiding the uneasy sensation that, from the end of the First World War, Steichen had lost the plot.
Penelope Niven, on the other hand, is just getting going. She was formerly the biographer of Steichen’s full-flowing brother-in-law, Carl Sandburg, and can’t quite bring herself to turn off the tap. Steichen’s difficult relations with his first wife, Clara, whom he married in 1903 and finally divorced, in a flurry of hand-to-hand recrimination, in 1922, inspire Niven to her most windswept prose: “He fascinated her with his powerful artistic energy and his early fame—not to mention his charismatic smile, his brooding intensity, his tall, lithe body, and the handsome face with the radiant gray-blue eyes. Was he better than she, or was she a cut above him?” She was madder than he, that’s for sure. After reading a few hundred pages of this stuff, you learn to ride the gush, not least because Steichen’s own temperament was streaked with romantic excess; in the double portrait that he took of himself and Clara on their honeymoon, he half smiles with secret pride, while she decorously pushes her white-clad bosom toward us, like the yearning heroine of Edvard Munch’s “The Voice,” painted ten years earlier. Yet Clara’s expression is calm and dead. Did Steichen really mean to hint that happiness was over before it had even begun?
In Niven’s hands, the arc of Steichen’s endeavor curves without a break from the teen-ager with the bicycle, who offered “the first rubber-tire telegram-delivery service” in Milwaukee for fifteen dollars a month, to the portrait photographer who demanded (and got) an annual salary of thirty-five thousand dollars from Condé Nast in 1923, icing the cake with twenty thousand from J. Walter Thompson the following year. Indeed, such is the rolling mass of projects into which Steichen threw himself that he sometimes emerges from Niven’s book as a born organizer and chronic inventor who just happened to devote his administrative talents to photography. Arriving at his studio, on East Sixty-third Street, for instance, Steichen would drive his car into the elevator and out into his office, on the third floor. (“Solves the parking problem,” he explained to friends.) For the first half of his life, he considered himself as much a painter as a photographer, and when he finally gave it up, in 1923, there was a typical flamboyance in his renunciation, as he took his canvases into the garden and burned them. Gardens themselves were another site of triumph. Steichen didn’t just grow flowers; he studied and crossbred them, first in France and then at his home in Umpawaug, Connecticut, producing delphiniums so grand that in 1936 he became the first—and, as far as one can gather, the only gardener to have his flowers given their own show at the Museum of Modern Art.
When the Second World War came round, even Steichen thought he might miss out on the fun. “I wish I could get into this one, but I’m too old,” he said miserably. Strings were pulled, however, and, at the age of sixty-two, he joined the United States Naval Reserves as a lieutenant commander. He saw action first in the Marshall Islands, on board the U.S.S. Lexington, where his neatest trick was to hang in the safety net at the edge of the deck and point his camera up at the Hellcats as they took off and landed over his head. Later, as chief of Navy combat photography, he went to Guam and Iwo Jima; when, in 1946, an official collection of wartime work by Steichen and others was published, it sold a million copies a month. According to one of his assistants, Wayne Miller, Steichen wanted to be “the Mathew Brady of World War II.” War offered him the best and cruellest opportunity to live out the belief, expressed in his autobiography, that “usefulness has always been attractive in the art of photography.” He had come a long way from the Flatiron Building, as exquisitely useless a photograph as it is possible to imagine: take it along as a practical guide to finding your way around Fifth Avenue and it would be only a matter of minutes before you fell down a manhole or banged your nose on a gas lamp.
Steichen’s discovery of usefulness reached its peak in 1955, when he curated “The Family of Man,” the exhibition that opened at the Museum of Modern Art and went on to tour the world. Eight years later, according to Niven, some nine million people in sixty-three countries had seen the show, and the accompanying book sold more than five million copies. The success of the project fortified Steichen’s status as a household name, and most probably helped him earn the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963; yet, from this distance, “The Family of Man” feels more like an index to the ideals of its age than like the timeless statement of affirmation that Steichen intended. It contained the work of two hundred and seventy-three photographers, and there are dazzling individual contributions from people such as Brassaï, Eisenstaedt, and Dorothea Lange; but their images are somehow diluted, rather than concentrated, by the surrounding flood—a queasy foreshadowing of the visual torrent in which we now daily swim.
What is disconcerting is not the sight of journalism cranking itself up into art but the way in which the hapless viewers are obliged to offer that art the degree and measure of attention that they would normally give to journalism. As a result, the show’s cascading humanism looks easy and low-cost; what was conceived as a kind of aesthetic response to the principles governing the United Nations now resembles a dry run for a Benetton commercial. Reviewing the original show, the Times announced that it “symbolizes the universality of human emotions.” The only part of that phrase I can find no objection to is the word “of.” The young Steichen who had dealt and fiddled with the particulars of a single scene or with the contours of one body had grown into the purveyor of all-purpose good will; morally, that is hard to fault, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that it comes with any guarantee of serious art.
Edward Steichen died in 1973; there is something awesome in the thought that one man could have learned his trade amid hand-tinted gum-bichromate prints and ended up in the age of the Nikon F and the motor drive. Whatever you think of photography, however you rate its powers and deplore the temptations that it seems so effortlessly to provide, Steichen is there at its core; his long career is a showcase for pretty well everything that you can dream of doing with one art. On his ninetieth birthday, in New York, he admitted, “When I first became interested in photography; I thought it was the whole cheese. My idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don’t give a hoot in hell about that.” But some of Steichen’s hoots were heavenly, and the echo went round the world. ♦
