Loneliness of the shape

This development of the photograph expression was crucial because it gave the full recognition of the movement of the Modernism in the United States. The creative output of that time made artist a gauge of the changes that were going on. If we examine the expansion of the urbanization, the ascendance of the machine and the social mutation of the human behaviour, it would be easier to read Stieglitz admiration for the growing pressure between the giant construction, the commercial waves and the intellectual arise in New York. It was a crucial moment also because America began its independent relationship with Europe. The artistic American context was no longer perceived as an isolated product of the Western European civilizations. Thus, Stieglitz artistic mediation and personal dialogical involvement as an artist and as a person – he sponsored young progressive American painters (Walkowitz, Hartley, Strand and even his wife O’Keeffe) ignored by other art dealers – in the New York cultural events showed that one could always go beyond the established definition of representing world of experience. One could reach for an accurate approach to the photography art: that to say, his egocentric and strong self-perception and definition toward the others provoked a huge admiration between his followers. Between 1913 and 1917 Stieglitz, actually has gradually lost the interest for the European art. Thanks to him, the Photo-Secession is been fast recognized abroad as an eminent paradigm of the revaluated and enlightened pictorialism in photography. Stieglitz was an individualist. Even though, he was in touch with the Mabel Dodge circle and the bohemian intelligentsia of Greenwich Village, but he never took a direct participation to their activities. Even though he used to be often accused of looking after other ideas, he remains an affirmed prophet of Modernism in the States. He had the ability not only to support, but to learn as well from young artists. His nature as a photographer was arrhythmic: it is very difficult to define or to understand Stieglitz various and not coherent production. He did not even try to refine the cold and grey discourse of his abstract light – writing. He remains unique artist perhaps because of the contradictions of his world experience testimony. The metaphorical secret contents of the world were imminent within his photo-description. Even, in the monster-figure in the image of New York from Shelton photograph, there is still some hidden romantic version of the idea of absence and deathly silence. Those photo –actions, if we could say so, were a tireless excavation and composition of an identity: the New York identity where buildings are emerging in to the higher sky light sphere. Nevertheless, in the 1926 Stieglitz exposed in the Brooklyn Museum in the same time with artist like Mondrian, Kandinsky, Miró and Man Ray. After the exhibition Armory Show he knew that the goals that he wanted to achieve were accomplished.
The lectures of Emerson and Whitman caused him a turbulent exaltation: he revokes the circular time and he became fully a metaphysical photograph. He finished his life in the Lake George where his parents had a property where his last photographs expressed a strange identification of his soul and of the trees. The poetry contemplation process was also crucial for the final self-definition as an artist. It made him call some photographs The Dying Chestnut Tree, or even Life and Death: its leaves poor of vitality, but flattened by the light, occupying the space with the void. We could almost hear Whitman’s A Clear Midnight18F:
This is thy hour, O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night sleeps, and the stars.

Photographs:
Alfred STIEGLITZ
1. Spring Showers – New York 1900 from Camera Work 36 – 1911. National Gallery of Art, New York.
2. O’Keefe, 1918.
3. The Flat-Iron – New York 1903. International Centre of Photography, New York.
4. From Shelton, Looking West – New York, 1935. National Gallery, New York.
5. The City of Ambitions – New York 1910 (from Camera Work). The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
6. A wet day on the Boulevard – Paris 1894 from Picturesque Bits of New York and Other Studies. The Art Institute of Chicago, Alfred Stieglitz Collection 1949 – 887.
Edward J. STEICHEN
1. The Flat-iron – Evening – New York, 1905. Museum of Modern Art New York.

Bibliography:
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CAILLE, Bernadette, New York et l’art moderne. Alfred Stieglitz et son cercle. Edition de la Réunion des musées nationaux, Paris 2004.
HEILBRUN, Françoise, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), 5 Continents / Musée d’Orsay, Milan-Paris 2004.
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