Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe

Messinger, Lisa Mintz, ed., with essays and entries by Magdalena Dabrowski, Cristel Hollevoet-Force, Lisa Mintz Messinger, Cora Michael, Jessica Murphy, Sabine Rewald, Samantha Rippner, and Thayer Tolles (2011)

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Description

A master photographer, Alfred Stieglitz was also a visionary promoter and an avid collector of American and European art from the first half of the twentieth century. Operating a succession of influential Manhattan galleries from 1905 to 1946, he exhibited many of the most important artists of the era, including Constantin Brancusi, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Vasily Kandinsky, John Marin, Henri Matisse, Georgia O'Keeffe, Francis Picabia, and Pablo Picasso. The collection he assembled of their works—by purchase, gift, and happy accident—was of exceptional breadth and depth and has been the cornerstone of the Metropolitan Museum's holdings of modern art since 1949.

This volume is the first catalogue of the Metropolitan's unparalleled Alfred Stieglitz Collection: more than four hundred paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints made between the 1880s and the 1940s. After an illuminating introduction that traces the collections formation and surprising dénouement, thirty-one short essays serve as focused biographies of the dealer and each of the artists he cultivated and collected, demonstrating the intense and often intimate relationships that affected artistic direction, financial well-being (or its opposite), and social and professional prestige. These discussions are enriched by new scholarship, technical analysis, and archival research, and many works in the collection are published here for the first time. Seen together in splendid color reproductions, they present a portrait of a supreme connoisseur—a man who acted as "midwife" in the creation of twentieth-century art.

Table of contents

Contents
Sponsor's Statement
Director's Foreword by Thomas P. Campbell
Acknowledgments by Lisa Mintz Messinger
Note to the Reader
Introduction

"The Pictures Collected Him": The Alfred Stieglitz Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Lisa Mintz Messinger

I. Artists Working in Europe

II. Artists Working in the United States

Stieglitz-Related Publications

Catalogue of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection in The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Paintings, Drawings, and Sculptures

Prints

Notes
Bibliography
Index
Photograph Credits

Press reviews

Artfix Daily

"... major scholarly catalog ..."

Times Literary Supplement

"Beautifully produced and exhaustively researched ... suggests the astonishing range of Stieglitz's interests."

The Burlington Magazine

"While many of the paintings in this collection ... are well known, the catalogue also includes full-colour illustrations of hundreds of rarely seen works on paper."

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Related Titles

Titles by thematic category (361)

Modern and Contemporary Art

Titles by author (94)

Magdalena Dabrowski

Christel Hollevoet-Force

Lisa Mintz Messinger

Cora Michael

Jessica Murphy

Sabine Rewald

Samantha Rippner

Thayer Tolles

Related Content

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History (14)

Essays (11)

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and American Photography

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) and His Circle

Art Nouveau

Arthur Dove (1880–1946)

Georgia O'Keeffe (1887–1986)

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864–1901)

Henri Matisse (1869–1954)

International Pictorialism

Lithography in the Nineteenth Century

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968)

The Print in the Nineteenth Century

Timelines (3)

France, 1800–1900 A.D.

Mexico and Central America, 1900 A.D.–present

The United States and Canada, 1900 A.D.–present

Exhibition

Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe

This exhibition is the first large-scale presentation of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from Alfred Stieglitz's collection, acquired by the Metropolitan in 1949. In addition to being a master photographer, Stieglitz (1864–1946) was a visionary promoter of modern American and European art, and he assembled a vast art collection of exceptional breadth and depth. Through a succession of influential galleries that he ran in New York City between 1905 and 1946, Stieglitz exhibited many of the most important artists of the era, and he collected works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Constantin Brancusi, Gino Severini, Vasily Kandinsky, Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Charles Demuth, and Arthur Dove. For more than sixty years, the Alfred Stieglitz Collection has been the cornerstone of the Museum's holdings of modern American art.

The exhibition features some two hundred major works by American and European modernists, supplemented by photographs by the Photo-Secessionists and publications by Stieglitz—all from the Metropolitan's holdings. Highlights include Picasso's Woman Ironing and Standing Female Nude, Kandinsky's Improvisation 27 (Garden of Love II), Brancusi's Sleeping Muse, O'Keeffe's Black Iris and Cow's Skull: Red, White, and Blue, Demuth's I Saw the Figure 5 in Gold, and Hartley's Portrait of a German Officer.

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