Edward Steichen, Black: Model Margaret Horan in a black dress by Jay-Thorpe. 1935, Courtesy Condé Nast Archive © 1935 Condé Nast Publications
Edward Steichen: In High Fashion, the Condé Nast Years, 1923-1937
by Michael Miller
Organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis, and the Musée de Élysée, Lausanne, Switzerland
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts: May 30-September 13, 2009
Current and upcoming venues:
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto: September 26, 2009-January 3, 2010
Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale Nova Southeastern University, Fort Lauderdale, Florida: February 28, 2010-April 11, 2010
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri: May 15 - July 25, 2010
Edward Steichen: Episodes from a Life in Photography, curated by John Stomberg, Chief Curator, The Williams College Museum of Art (at WCMA only)
This important exhibition of Edward Steichen's fashion and celebrity photography for Condé Nast, which will close soon in Toronto and continue on to Fort Lauderdale and Kansas City, emerged from an earlier, ambitious survey of his entire career, Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography, also organized by Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography and the Musée de Élysée. While researching that exhibition, the curators, William Ewing and Todd Brandow, discovered two thousand vintage prints from Steichen's years at Vogue and Vanity Fair in the Condé Nast Archive, where they were catalogued and preserved to museum standards. These had never been exhibited before and presented an opportunity not to be missed. Hence Ewing and Brandow, together with Carol Squiers of the International Center of Photography, and Natalie Herschdorfer of the Musée de Élysée, set to work on this companion exhibition with some excitement. In the catalogue the sumptuous plates are interspersed with four essays from different points of view. William Ewing provides an acutely perceptive general account of the place of this work in Steichen's career. Carol Squiers discusses Steichen's position at Condé Nast and how he worked within the house system, not always with the brilliant results we see in the exhibition. She also make the important point that he only moved entirely away from his Pictorialist roots after the arrival in 1928 of a new art director, Mehemed Fehmy Agha, and his make-over of Vogue in favor of a simple, clear modernist taste. Tobia Bezzola places Steichen within the artistic currents of the time and investigates his aesthetic as a merger between his high Pictorialist ideals and commercialism. Steichen surprised his colleagues by actually taking pride in his work, insisting on putting his name to it. Natalie Herschdorfer fills in the background on the fashions of the time and the social currents which influenced them. The whole brings to life a bygone world of elegance and ambition, rehabilitates an underestimated period of Steichen's career, and shows Steichen's contribution to photography during this phase of his activity to be no less significant than what came before or after.
Edward Steichen, Design for Stehli Silks, 1926. Permission Joanna T. Steichen.
At the Williams College Museum of Art the show was accompanied by an impressive support exhibition,Edward Steichen: Episodes from a Life in Photography, curated by John Stomberg, which provided a context for the photographer's work at Condé Nast with especially distinguished examples, beginning with a vintage print of his famous portrait of Richard Strauss. Most astonishing is a pattern of matchsticks and matchboxes he photographed as a study for a fabric design. (His work as a designer appears in his Condé Nast work in the form of a piano of his own design he favored as a prop.) From later in life his illustrations for Thoreau's Walden are deeply absorbing in their contemplative simplicity. In this fine show, I'd only question the several oversize posthumous prints, which seem cold and ostentatious as artefacts of the early days of photography collecting in the 1960's and 70's.
Edward Steichen, Self-Portrait with Photographic Paraphernalia, New York. 1929. Courtesy Condé Nast Archive © 1929 Condé Nast Publications.
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