Missionary of the New

He was one of the most vivid, idealistic, stubborn and thorny characters ever to appear in American culture. He was a battler, a moralist, an unstoppable advocate for the artists he loved, a connoisseur of the erotic and one of the greatest photographers who ever tripped a shutter. Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was the first American art dealer young modernism had. But to call him a dealer does him no justice. His influence was huge, and entirely for the good. Yet where was the great exhibition that traced his life's work? The one that showed in detail how "his" artists related to him and, through him, to the embryonic American public for new art?

Answer: it just opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. "Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries" is a wonderfully informative show, assembled at the highest level of quality, full of protein, no fat. It is installed with perfect taste and simplicity--as it should be, since that was how Stieglitz showed new art in his 291 Gallery, plain and direct. Organized by art historian Sarah Greenough and backed up by an excellent catalog with essays by a dozen leading art historians, the show is a must-see if you want to understand how modernism grew in the U.S.; how America caught up with itself and with Paris; how, in the extraordinary blossoming of the first decades of the 20th century, American painting, sculpture and photography, in large part thanks to Stieglitz's fervent early support, became as "modern" as American bridges, skyscrapers and trains.

Born in 1864 to wealthy Jewish parents, Stieglitz was schooled in New York City but spent most of the 1880s in Germany, studying the relatively young art of which he was to be such a master: photography. This was his first obsession, and when he got back to New York, he made up his mind to revolutionize it. Most American photographers, to him, were stuffy and sentimental "pictorialists," so bent on imitating the look of painting that they couldn't treat photography as an equal, independent medium. He developed a "straight" photography--direct, candid and true to nature--that captured American city experience as it had never been caught on film before, from the steaming draft horses in The Terminal, 1893, to the exquisitely etched, near Japanese view of the Flatiron Building in snow, 1902. The hundreds of photos he made of Georgia O'Keeffe, his lover and (after 1924) his wife, are an intense and extended erotic essay. Never before had a camera scrutinized a woman so closely or praised a fine-boned body with such rapturous aesthetic effect.

With his friend Edward Steichen, he founded what they called the Photo-Secession, a small group of progressive American photographers. For some 14 years after 1903, its superbly produced magazine, Camera Work (which Stieglitz edited and oversaw), set an unbeatable standard for art publishing in the U.S. The impact of Stieglitz's work, and his charismatic personality, on younger photographers like Paul Strand was incalculable. If Stieglitz had made nothing but photographs, he would deserve a permanent niche in the American pantheon--an idea that probably would have offended him, who thought in terms of change, not permanence.

But, of course, this tireless magus made much more than photographs. There had never before been an American cultural discoverer like Stieglitz, and there will not be another. He was to modern art what Charles Lindbergh would become to aviation--Homo transatlanticus, the link between Paris and New York. He was by far the most consequential evangelist for the avant-garde in visual art that the U.S. had ever seen. First, he was the first man to set the work of Europeans like Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Constantin Brancusi and Francis Picabia before the American public. Later, he would also be the first to back the chief American modernists of his time, not only O'Keeffe but also others of greater aesthetic weight: John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and Charles Demuth.

People still think of the Armory Show of 1913 as the symbolic launch of modernism in New York, but actually it happened a few years earlier and in a much smaller place--"the biggest small room in the world," as a friend called Stieglitz's diminutive gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, which he had started in 1905 to promote photography and which started showing paintings and sculpture soon after.

Modern art has been such a fixture of American life for so long that one is apt to forget what obstacles Stieglitz faced when he stood up for it. Forget the general public; few Americans had even heard of Picasso or Matisse in 1910, and most jeered at their work as the daubing of absinthe-soaked madmen. Stieglitz, however, didn't give a damn. He took it as an article of faith that the masses would never grasp what he and his friends were up to. Cultural progress, he wrote in 1903, only came about through "the fanatical enthusiasm of the revolutionist, whose extreme teaching has saved the mass from utter inertia." Like so many of the best and brightest a century ago, he earnestly believed in progress in the arts--a lost faith today. While the broad American middlebrow public frowned at modernism, Stieglitz believed it was a model of authentic experience, the appointed bearer of a culture's life-force.