Edward Steichen

Biography

In 1928 Steichen bought a farm outside West Redding, Connecticut, and named it Umpawaug. He lived there until his death, and the land later became Topstone Park. For a man who had started in a lithography shop, it was a long road.

He was born on 27 March 1879 in the village of Bivange (also spelled Bivingen in Russian) in Luxembourg, and was christened Éduard Jean. His parents, who were in straitened circumstances, emigrated to the United States when he was eighteen months old: his father went in 1880 and settled in Hancock, in the copper country of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and his mother brought the boy after him. In 1889 the family moved to Milwaukee. At school he learned German and English, while at home he spoke Luxembourgish. His sister Lilian later married the poet Carl Sandburg, and that family tie would come in useful.

From the age of fifteen he attended Pio Nono College, a Catholic school where his drawings were noticed, but he left to take a four-year apprenticeship at a lithography firm. In the evenings he drew and taught himself to paint. In 1895 he bought his first camera, a secondhand Kodak “detective” box camera. With friends he rented a small room in Milwaukee and called the group the Milwaukee Art Students League. In 1899 his photographs were shown at the second Philadelphia Photographic Salon. In 1900 he became a United States citizen; he went on using the name Éduard until the end of the First World War. In April 1900 Steichen set off to study painting in Paris, met Stieglitz in New York on the way, and Stieglitz bought three of his prints. In 1902 Stieglitz asked him to design a logo and typeface for the future magazine Camera Work, where Steichen was published more often than anyone else. In 1905 they opened the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, later known by its address as “291”. It held some of the first American exhibitions of Auguste Rodin, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne, Pablo Picasso and Constantin Brâncuși. From 1904 Steichen experimented with colour photography and was one of the first in the United States to work with the Autochrome process. He crossed the ocean constantly, and it seems to me that these voyages made him a go-between for European and American art.

“The Pond–Moonlight” (1904) was taken in Mamaroneck, New York, near the home of the critic Charles Caffin. The colour effect was made by hand, with layers of light-sensitive gum solutions on the paper; three prints are known, two of them in museums.

In 1911 the publisher Lucien Vogel challenged Steichen to present fashion as a fine art. He photographed gowns by Paul Poiret, and the pictures appeared in the April issue of the magazine Art et Décoration; two were in colour, next to drawings by Georges Lepape. In his 1963 autobiography Steichen himself called them probably the first serious fashion photographs, and many have since repeated the claim. Their soft focus and retouching set them apart from the sharp commercial pictures of the time. In the First World War he commanded the photographic division of the American Expeditionary Forces and came out of it a colonel. After the war he gradually returned to straight photography. In the early 1920s he made more than a thousand pictures of a single cup and saucer, varying the tones from white to black, and compared this to a pianist’s scales. In 1923 Condé Nast hired him at a salary of $35,000; he became chief photographer of Vogue and Vanity Fair and remained so until 1938. He photographed celebrities, Greta Garbo among them, and worked for advertising agencies.

By the start of the Second World War Steichen had almost given up photography and was breeding new varieties of delphinium; in 1936 they were the subject of his first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Because of his age he was refused for active service, but in January 1942 the Navy appointed him director of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, with the rank of lieutenant commander. The unit made the film “The Fighting Lady” (1944), which won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. In 1942 Steichen put together the exhibition “Road to Victory” for the museum, followed in January 1945 by “Power in the Pacific”. In December 1945 he was released from service with the rank of captain.

In 1947 he was appointed director of the museum’s photography department, and he held the post until 1962. His appointment was protested. Ansel Adams wrote in a letter that replacing Beaumont Newhall with a regime favourable to the spectacular and the “popular” would be a body blow to creative photography. Even so, as early as 1943, as a judge for the annual yearbook US Camera, Steichen had chosen Adams’s “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico” for publication. At the museum he bought and showed younger photographers: Robert Frank, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind; in 1952 he acquired two works by Robert Rauschenberg, ahead of any museum. His own retrospective, “Steichen the Photographer”, he showed only in 1961, after announcing his retirement.

His best-known exhibition, “The Family of Man”, opened in 1955: more than five hundred photographs of life, love and death from 68 countries. The preface to the catalogue was written by Steichen’s brother-in-law Carl Sandburg. Nine million people saw the exhibition; it toured the world and is now on permanent display in Clervaux Castle in northern Luxembourg, where it was given at Steichen’s wish. In 2003 the collection was added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register.

In 1963 President Lyndon Johnson presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Steichen died on his farm on 25 March 1973, two days before his ninety-fourth birthday.