New York - From now until January 2012, independent art collectors of ArtKabinett social network are invited to the Metropolitan Museum to view an immense retrospective exhibit of the works of Alfred Stieglitz.
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, Wassily 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 will feature some three 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 Garden of Love, 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.
Alfred Stieglitz's contribution to the history of photography extends far beyond his photographic work, which he began as a student in Germany in 1883.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey into a prosperous German-Jewish family, he influenced generations of photographers, painters, and sculptors both directly and indirectly. In 1905, with Edward Steichen, he founded the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291 Fifth Avenue in New York, which later became known simply as 291.
He elevated photography's status to the level of painting and sculpture through the numerous pioneering exhibitions that he organized.
Stieglitz was a founder of the Photo-Secessionist and Pictorialist photography movements in the United States and promoted them in Camera Notes and Camera Work , the influential journals that he founded and edited. His early photographs were Pictorialist in style.
His late work focused in depth on a few subjects, including New York City, the cloud studies that he called "Equivalents," and a portrait series of his wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe.
Stieglitz worked tirelessly through his efforts as a photographer, collector, curator, writer, and publisher to secure photography's role as a legitimate medium of fine art. He died in 1946.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue of the entire collection. The exhibition is made possible by the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation.
