Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography [Paperback]

Sue Davidson Lowe (Author), Anne Havinga (Author), Edward Steichen (Editor), Alfred Stieglitz (Photographer), Arthur Dove (Author), Georgia O'Keeffe (Author), Mark Strand (Author), Marsden Hartley (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 2, 2002

"Stieglitz is as scholarly a production as anyone could wish, crammed with facts and trailing informative appendixes. It is also a loving and occasionally exasperated look at a contentious relative and the intimate circumstances that formed him." --Time A tireless exponent of the avant-garde and of photography as a fine art, as well as a consummate photographer in his own right, Alfred Stieglitz was both the embodiment of rebellious New York modernism and an oddly domestic man who retained a lifelong attachment to his family's country estate. In Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography, author Sue Davidson Lowe, Stieglitz's grand-neice, presents the man in all of his complexity, tracing his background and revealing the interplay between his character and his multifaceted career. She offers new insight into Stieglitz's relationships with artists such as Marin, Hartley, Dove, Steichen, and O'Keefe; his pioneering promotion of Europe's most radical artists through the Photo-Secession group and the 291 gallery; and his creation of some of our century's most enduring photographic images. Gracefully weaving personal reminiscence and verifiable fact as she lucidly interweaves Stieglitz's career with his personal life, Lowe presents a uniquely compelling and intimate portrait of a hugely influential, hugely enigmatic American artist.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A portrait-in-the-round of the pioneer American photographer...Affectionate but measured." -- New Yorker

"Contains a trove of choice information." -- Boston Globe

"Fascinating." -- Newsweek

"Lowe has written a book that finally captures the personality of Alfred Stieglitz." -- Washington Post Book World

About the Author

Perhaps no other person has done as much to legitimize the art of photography as did Alfred Stieglitz. Born in 1864 in Hoboken, New Jersey, Stieglitz studied mechanical engineering in Berlin but was always drawn to taking pictures. He won the first of his 150 photography prizes at age 24 in a British competition judged by P.H. Emerson. Returning to New York in 1889, Stieglitz began writing on photography and exhibiting his own work, the most celebrated of which include The Terminal (1893) and The Steerage (1907). In 1902, Stieglitz founded the Photo-Secession group and opened his first gallery, 291, where he exhibited American photographers of the Pictorialist movement, and painters and sculptors including Matisse, Braque, Rodin, and Georgia O'Keeffe, whom he married in 1924. That same year he began publishing the quarterly Camera Work. Stieglitz ran two other art spaces, the Intimate Gallery and An American Place, and continued to photograph until his death in 1946, leaving behind hundreds of studies of O'Keeffe, photographs of Lake George, and New York City views.

Product Details

• Paperback: 512 pages
• Publisher: MFA Publications (September 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0878466495
• ISBN-13: 978-0878466498
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,465,253 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

SUE DAVIDSON [GEIGER] LOWE, Guilford, Connecticut.

Current occupation: writer; occasional landscape designer.
Previous professions: Publishing: 1945-6 research & editorial assistant to Joseph Campbell for his The Hero with a Thousand Faces & Heinrich Zimmer's The King & the Corpse. Citizen Education: 1946-8 executive secretary/faculty member NY Ethical Culture Society's Encampment for Citizenship. Theater: 1944 Broadway production assistant Hope for the Best; 1948 associate- & co-producer 1) Broadway: The Men We Marry, Sally & 1950 The Enchanted; 2) 1948 touring company Anna Lucasta; 3) 1949 summer theaters Atlantic City, NJ & Norfolk, Va. 1956 translator/adaptor Albert Husson play The Lesser Comores produced at Bucks County Playhouse. Television: 1951-2 production assistant Channel V What's the Story? & Who Do You Trust?; 1952 assistant producer 1st closed-circuit TV national sales conference for Schenley Distributors. Translator: 1954-7 plays/articles by 13 French authors including Giraudoux & Camus. Published Author: 1983 Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography, Farrar Straus & Giroux, NYC; also Quartet/Or!, London; 2002 new edition BFA Publications; 1988-89 magazine articles in Arts & Antiques; 1992 chapter From the Faraway Nearby Addison-Wesley; 1994 article on Piet Mondrian's Wallworks in Sao Paolo exhibition catalogue. Lecturer: 1984-2002 major US universities, galleries, museums on Stieglitz, O'Keeffe, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Reiner Leist. Interviews Radio, TV & Film: 1993-2002 US & European
documentaries on Stieglitz, O'Keeffe, Edward Steichen. Landscape designer: 1984-2000 company HQ, residences in 3 states, also in NYC, Cathedral of St. John the Divine. Managing trustee: 1992-7 Piet Mondrian/Harry Holtzman Trust, handling Mondrian copyrights & exhibitions at Museum of Modern Art NYC, National Gallery, Gemeente-museum in The Hague, Tokoro Gallery in Tokyo, U. of Michigan, Sao Paulo Museum in Brazil. Volunteer: 1948-1958 Trustee, Encampment for Citizenship; 1958-1970 Trustee & 1962-69 Board Secretary, Dalton Schools, NYC; 1964 tour guide/occasional speechwriter for UN/ECOSOC Ambassador Franklin Williams; 1974-6 Board member East Side International Community Center. Former member: 1945-1976 Actors Equity & Screen Actors Guild; 1955-1992 Dramatists Guild, Authors League of America. Awards/Honors: 1985 Special Citation American Photo-graphic Historical Society; 1999 Garden Club of America honoree, Smithsonian Archives of American Gardens. Personal History: Born New York City 1922, 2nd daughter of Elizabeth Stieglitz (1897-1956) & Donald Douglas (1878-1956) Davidson; sister Elizabeth Margery (Peggy) Davidson McManus Bodkin Murray (1919-2002). 1944 wed USAAF Lt. Peter E. Geiger (b.1923), widowed 1945. 1950 wed theatre & TV producer/ director/writer David Lowe (1917-65), divorced 1954. Mother of painter/photographer Ellen Douglas Lowe (1951- ) & stepmother of TV producer/director David Lowe, Jr. (1945- ). Education: 1938 honor graduate of Dalton School; 1939 honor post-graduate Baldwin School; 1939-40 Vassar freshman; fall 1940 New School for Social Research; 1941 January to June 1943 Sarah Lawrence College, BA fall 1943 (Class of 1944) after 1942 & 1943 half-year summer courses at Barnard & Columbia University Graduate School. Travels 1934-1999: Great Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg, Italy, Austria, Monte Carlo, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Japan, Montreal, 24 US states (including Hawaii).

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Entirely worthwhile read., July 25, 2001

By 

TFic (Texas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Stieglitz: A Memoir / Biography (Hardcover)

This is an excellent biography. Written by Sue Davidson Lowe, Alfred Stieglitz's niece, "Stieglitz : A Memoir/Biography" is written objectively, yet with the knowingness and acceptance of a relative. This book presents a well-balanced picture of Stieglitz, his accomplishments (not only his own artistic endeavors, but his efforts to make photography an accepted art form), friends, family, and life. When I was done reading this biography, I felt that I had been presented with a coherent, entertaining, and candid portrayal of Stieglitz. I have read many biographies and autobiographies, of these, I have felt that about one-fourth are well-written and worth reading -- this Stieglitz biography is one of them.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a thoroughly nuanced account of a problematic figure, July 6, 2006

By 

Gordon L. Fuglie "text tornado" (topeka, KS, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography (Paperback)

My interest in this biography was piqued by my mounting scepticism of the claims of early 20th century modernist artists and their promoters, whether critics, collectors or curators. Much of what we think we know about early American modernism is little more than oft repeated hand-me-down information that manifests the bearer's uncritical satisfaction with the modernist enterprise. Such information serves to maintain the artist's place in the modernist temple that subsequent enthusiasts and fans have constructed and served as keepers of the flame. Critical, layered and thorough historical study reveals such notions as ideology, mere mythologizing constructs.

Readers of Ms. Lowe's exceptionally well written biography will find a fair and balanced AND critically engaged account of an adequately talented photographer who was one of the principal apologists of modernist ideas in New York, with a reputation in Europe as well. With his small enclosed (are modernist gatherings ever open?) circle of artists and holding court in his galleries, Alfred Stieglitz combatively denounced skeptical visitors who didn't or wouldn't "get it." This was was the Stieglitzian modernist "my way or the highway" pronouncement which cowed fawning acolytes.

A vorcious AND impressionable reader, he embraced Freudian ideas subsequently discredited in the later 20th century. Believing in the "pure artist untainted by commerce,Stieglitz turned against his young associate Edward Steichen when the latter became successful as an artistic commercial photographer (his career was also characterized by attracting the public; Stieglitz's publications always shed their subscribers who got fed-up with his sermonizing enthusiasms that strayed from photographic matters) Mind you, Steichen accomplished a multi-faceted career without "daddy's money," with which Stieglitz was bankrolled for much of his bohemian life (danke, PaPa!). He seems to also have been his mother's favorite.

Among the book's strong sections are its coverage of the regular gatherings of the Stieglitz clan at the family's summer house in upstate New York. Here family dynamics were played out that revealingly throw Stieglitz's personality into contrast with those of his siblings, friends and younger lover Georgia O'Keefe (one of the more over-rated American artists of the 20th century) who also shared his inflexible termperament.

The author, who spent years meticulously researching available archives (some still remain sealed), has produced a fully-orbed account of the glories and contradictions of an archetypal American modernist. It is a definitive study of Steiglitz and his personal world.

5.0 out of 5 stars New Insight into Alfred Steiglitz, November 14, 2010

By 

Karen Halpern "Curious Artist" (Bloomfield, MI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Stieglitz: A Memoir / Biography (Hardcover)

I'm enjoying my reading experience of this biography of Steiglitz, because it offers the reader firsthand knowledge, as well as information gleaned from other parties associated with Alfred. Although my prior knowledge of him has been primarily through reading about Georgia O'Keeffe or other artists whose work he promoted, I didn't realize that Georgia entered his life after so many years of his unhappy marriage. The experiences in life which shaped him into an individual with such strong personal convictions also has given me a much more complete understanding of who he was, and the trials he faced in being true to a personal philosophy. Although I am only half done with the book, I have gleaned so much new information already, and am finding it very satisfying reading.Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography