Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters

Reviewed by Ann Landi

Alfred Stieglitz: Taking Pictures, Making Painters
by Phyllis Rose
Yale University Press, 272 pp, $26.00

We live in an age when shows of photography are a mainstay of many major museums, and a handful of artists who seriously pursue the medium have even achieved celebrity status (think Sherman, Arbus, Mapplethorpe). So it’s almost mind-boggling to realize that the struggle to get photography considered a “fine art” rather than simply a mechanical craft, at least in this country, is little more than a hundred years old, and that the medium’s meteoric launch into the public consciousness is largely thanks to the efforts of one man: Alfred Steiglitz.

Stieglitz was himself a master photographer whose varied career and accomplishments could stand alone in the annals of art history. But he was also a savvy dealer whose efforts brought to the American public works on paper by Europeans like Matisse, Rodin, and Cézanne. Beginning in 1905, with the famed gallery called, simply, 291 (after its Fifth Avenue address), he also nurtured and developed the painters we have come to think of as founders of American Modernism: Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Arthur Dove, and, of course, Georgia O’Keeffe. His long-running and often tumultuous marriage to O’Keeffe, 23 years his junior and destined for perhaps greater fame, is a story that could stand alone as the subject of a book (its beginnings were memorably told in a 2009…