Edward Steichen

flush-mounted, title and date in pencil and with typed credit and 'Return to Edward Steichen, The Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York 19, N. Y.' label with circular 'Zollzweigstelle - Koln - Kolner Messe' stamp, and 'Deutsch Buch - Gemeinschaft, Darmstadt' brown paper label with credit and annotations in ink, on the reverse, 1904, printed before 1963 (Grosse Photographen Unseres Jahrhunderts, p. 36, this print; Camera Work No. 14, April 1906; Steichen the Photographer, p. 29; A Life in Photography, pl. 32)

The Collection of Joanna Steichen

Bequeathed to the present owner, 2010

Cologne, Photokina, Grosse Photographen Unseres Jahrhunderts, March 1963

This print, on textured semi-matte paper, has neutral tones and has been flush-mounted to thin board that extends a fraction beyond the print edge. It is in generally excellent condition. The edges are slightly rubbed, and there is minute intermittent chipping. The letterpress brown paper 'Deutsch Buch - Gemeinschaft, Darmstadt label' has the following information: Bild Nr. 5/3 Seite (3) Fotograf Edward Steichen Original 26.8 x 33.7 Wird 24 x 30.2 Bemerkungen Keine Retunde! The following notations are on the reverse of the mount: '1" round grey' and '10 3/4/13 5/16' in ink '275A ACMS - EJS' in pencil
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Edward Steichen's The Flatiron—Evening is an image that ranks among the photographer's most important achievements.  Prints of this image from any decade are scarce.  The present print comes originally from the collection of Joanna Steichen and was likely the print shown in L. Fritz Gruber's 1963 Photokina exhibition, Grosse Photographen Unseres Jahrhunderts.  Gruber, a photo historian, curator, and collector, was the founding director of exhibitions at this world-famous Cologne trade fair, and the print offered here carries a Cologne customs stamp on the reverse.  In 1964, Gruber authored a book of images from the exhibition which was published by Deutsche Buch-Gemeinschaft.  Also on the reverse of the print is the letterpress Deutsch Buch-Gemeinschaft label with printing notations.

Situated on a wedge between Fifth Avenue and Broadway at 23^rd Street, just seven blocks south of Steichen's studio, the Flatiron Building was the only skyscraper north of 14^th Street at the time of its completion in 1902.  A symbol of New York's architectural and commercial pre-eminence, the 22-story Renaissance Revival/Beaux Arts-style building was designed by Chicago architect Daniel Burnham and designer Frederick P. Dinkelberg for the Fuller Company, a general contractor specializing in erecting skyscrapers.  It inspired both praise and controversy from the time it was built.  Modernist poet and critic Sadakichi Hartmann, himself the subject of a 1903 Steichen portrait, championed the rapidly-evolving New York cityscape in his essay 'The "Flat-Iron" Building—an Esthetical Dissertation,' published in Camera Work Number 4 in October 1903.  'I, for my part, do not only believe in the possibility of architectural originality,' he wrote, 'but am convinced that it will first reveal itself prominently in America.'  About the Flatiron Building in particular, he observed,

'It is typically American in conception as well as execution.  It is a curiosity of modern architecture, solely built for utilitarian purposes, and at the same time a masterpiece of iron-construction.  It is a building without main façade, resembling more than anything else the prow of a giant man-of-war. And we would not be astonished in the least, if the whole triangular block would suddenly begin to move northward through the crowd of pedestrians and traffic of our two leading thoroughfares, which would break like the waves of the ocean on the huge prow-like angle.'

It is this streamlined shape of the building at dusk, with traffic flowing on either side, that figures so prominently in Steichen's The Flatiron, an image that functions simultaneously as both Pictorial and modern.  Taken in 1904, when the prevailing Pictorialist aesthetic mandated atmospheric effects, the photograph was first printed in the painterly gum-bichromate processes of the day, of which Steichen was the undisputed master.  Yet the image retains its Modernist impact as a gelatin silver print of the mid-20^th century, exemplified by the print offered here.  The emphasis on stark silhouettes of branches and figures in the foreground recall the photographer's apprenticeship in graphic design; the shimmering streets and dots of light, his training as a painter.  No photographer understood the elegance of the metropolis at night better than Steichen, as evidenced by his city views made upon his return to the United States after World War I.  Those very modern pictures have their origin in The Flatiron—Evening, which is every bit as modern in conception as his later city photographs.  Presented here as an expertly-rendered gelatin silver print, in which the details of the scene are revealed to an extent that eluded his Pictorial printing style, one sees that Steichen's vision was always a fundamentally modern one.

The Flatiron—Evening was featured in a number of early exhibitions and publications of his work.  A print of The Flatiron was included in the inaugural exhibition of the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession in November 1905, as well as Steichen's one-man show there in 1906, and in the highly important International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1910, among others.  It was first published in Camera Work Number 12 (cf. Lot 57) in April 1906, and in the sumptuously-produced Steichen Book of the same year.