The Alienation of the Artist

ALFRED STIEGLITZ became an American legend in his own lifetime. Today, only five years after his death, he is acknowledged to be the herald and sponsor of modern art in America; the father of modern photography; the American promoter of Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri Rousseau, C6zanne, Rodin's drawings, Picasso's cubist work, African Negro sculpture, and children's art; the impresario of several of America's greatest native artists, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Alfred Maurer, among many others; and the hub of a unique circle of painters, photographers, writers, educators, architects, musicians, and critics responsible for much of America's contemporary culture. While Stieglitz and his circle have received fully merited attention and critical acclaim, no attempt has yet been made to investigate the orientation of Stieglitz in the world of art. At the turn of the century, the mature Stieglitz, already a famed photographer, took up the battle for modern art in America. Marie Dressler ushered in the twentieth century with her jangling New Year's Day resolution of 1901: My new leaf? Well, it's going to be a leaf of gold and inscribed on the top, VIVA LA DOUGH.'1 It was the year of the fabulous dinner at the New York Riding Club, where middle-aged, fashionably dressed men ate on horseback, both they and the horses attended by costumed servants. The folk heroes of the Gilded Age-patterned on the model of Jay Cooke-men who had scrambled upward in uncouth ways, waved the dollar bill as

Aesthetics · Alienation · Art · Art history · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Art History and Market Analysis · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Law · Photography and Visual Culture · Psychology

• The Role of Subject and Symbol in American Pictorialism

  Colleen Denney•History of Photography•1989

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