Alfred Stieglitz

flush-mounted, mounted again to board, framed, 1931

Doris Bry, New York, 1994

Greenough 1388

Waldo Frank, et al., America & Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait (New York, 1934), pl. 32d

Bonnie Yochelson, Alfred Stieglitz: New York (New York, 2010),  p. 77

Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York, 1960), pl. LXVIII

In Focus: Alfred Stieglitz (J. Paul Getty Museum, 1995), pl. 42

Stieglitz's challenge with this image was to coax detail from a very "thin" negative. The resulting print is a brilliantly detailed symphony of black and gray tones. As is characteristic of Stieglitz's photographs from this period, this print is flush-mounted to thin board. The flush-mounted print is mounted onto a larger sheet of off-white board. It is likely that this secondary mount is modern, although it adheres to Stieglitz's precise proportions. The lovely glossy surface of this print suggests that Stieglitz coated this print, as was his practice at the time. When examined closely in high raking light, several discreet areas of original retouching can be seen. There is a tiny loss of emulsion on the print's upper left corner.
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Evening, New York from the Shelton, is one of a series of images of mid-town Manhattan that Stieglitz began in 1927 and continued into the 1930s.  Taken from the windows of his apartment in the Shelton Hotel, or from his Intimate Gallery and later, An American Place, the photographs record the buildings at different times of day and evening, and the changing skyline.  These beautiful, meditative photographs are one of Stieglitz’s last great bodies of work. 

In Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, Sarah Greenough locates prints of the image offered here in the following institutions: the National Gallery of Art; The Museum of Modern Art; the J. Paul Getty Museum; the Princeton University Art Museum; The Philadelphia Museum of Art (two prints); and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.  

“So rapidly are tall, and ever taller, buildings springing up in the metropolitan centers of the United States today that the twenty-story skyscrapers which impressed the European visitor in 1910 have either been demolished or else completely overshadowed in American architecture’s skyward race.  Each month sees an old landmark tumbled into ruins and in its place a lean steel skeleton ascending toward new heights.”

Harvey Wiley Corbett, America Builds Skyward, 1932