“The Aesthetic Movement in America: Artists of the Photo-Secession” at UMMA

REVIEW VISUAL ART

Photo-Secession

The Steerage by Alfred Stieglitz, 1907, photogravure.

The Photo-Secession movement is one of those rare historic instances where radicalism won -- and still wins today.

As seen in “The Aesthetic Movement in America: Artists of the Photo-Secession” at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, this turn-of-the-20th-century American creation became “the first truly international photography movement,” as noted in the gallery statement by UMMA Curator Emerita Carole McNamara. She also wrote that the movement's practitioners -- among them ringleader Alfred Stieglitz as well as Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsebier, Edward Steichen, Paul Strand, and Clarence White -- “sought to position photography as a legitimate aesthetic artform.”

This Pictorialism (as it was called) “favored soft-focus images that drew upon the conventions of important artists and movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries," McNamara wrote, noting that the "the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites, James McNeill Whistler, Japonisme, and Art Nouveau are readily seen in the images on view in this exhibition.”

Right said and worth noting if only because our current age presumes all photographs are manipulated in one manner or another, so it requires a bit of a mental stretch to cast back to this time when photography was not largely manipulated for art purposes. After all, it was often enough just to get the image since photography as a mechanized process of visual reproduction was well less than a century old. The battles that first informed the medium were the technological issues that involved the reproduction of imagery.

As such, the very presumption of the Photo-Secession was radical in its manner. After all, the issue of aesthetic -- while clearly dependent on the technology at hand -- is also a bit of a second-order consideration.

Yet what a consideration, indeed.

The history of the movement says that chief instigator Alfred Stiglitz formed the group in 1902 out of the rump of the famed New York City-based National Arts Club that was attempting to pull together a display of what passed for the best of American photography at the time. Just as with other kinds of arts around the world, what was progressive in the art of photography came to the fore in the National Arts Club through Stiglitz’s mechanizations.

The result of his effort -- as well as its offshoots including the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession commonly called Studio 291 (for the gallery’s address on Fifth Avenue); the quarterly Camera Work periodical; and cutting-edge large-scale international exhibits of works composed by photographers of similar sympathy -- was a radical interpretation of what photography could be.

What initially fused these photographers together -- as well ultimately led to the group’s demise some 15 years later -- was an interest in what photographers now largely take for granted: The manipulation of the medium through the modification of photo negatives and other such non-photographic textures.

As such, McNamara’s mention of the pre-Raphaelites -- James McNeill Whistler, Japonisme, and Art Nouveau -- is quite on target because each of these styles of painting or design sought to imaginatively enhance the creation of art. These artforms' varied moody abstractions and vibrant symbolisms were in clear contrast to the conservative academic painting and photographic realism that was still the conventional standard of the day.

Stieglitz -- like all natural anarchists -- pointed his Photo-Secession in directions so far off the beaten path, the group itself floundered a few years after it was pulled together. But their effort is a highwater mark in art photography that’s still an inspiration to artists of all sorts to this day.

Photo-Secession

Dawn by Alice Boughton, 1909, photogravure.

For example, Alice Boughton’s bravura Dawn photogravure (taken from Camera Work, issue 26, April 1909) highlights this willingness of the Photo-Secession photographers to mingle their artful inclinations. Photogravure is a photo-mechanical process where a copper plate coated with light-sensitive emulsion is exposed to the film positive, which creates an intaglio print that in turn produces an artificial tone reproducing the photograph’s detail.

Boughton’s Dawn does this superbly. The dreamy photograph -- certainly among of the most famous figurative photographs every produced -- mingles the timeless female nude with the advance of technology as the work has equal roots in painting, printmaking, and photography. In particular, the work’s second-order intaglio is well-suited to the composition as the model holds a globe up to the sky while the clouds and landscape in the background fade in variable recession in contrast to the work’s mid-ground sunburst that illuminates the shimmering waterline in which the model stands.

An equally observant photograph on display in the exhibit illustrates how a professional photographer’s sure eye can be aided by technology to yield a masterwork. Stieglitz’s 1907 photogravure The Steerage (shown at the top of this post and first published in Camera Work, issue 36, October 1911) points to the possible future of photographic journalism and realism through the unifying guise of art.

Photographed in June 1907 from the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II’s upper deck, Stieglitz captures both a slice of life as well as a heady precursor of the American Precisionist movement in its extraordinary complex interweaving of geometric space and documentary portraiture. Mingling sociology with an inspired sense of intersecting points, line, and surface, Stieglitz set the bar extraordinarily high for future photographers and journalists in his brilliant privileged moment. By any standard, the work is an invaluable historical document detailing social and economic standing as much through aesthetic insight as reflexive technique.

Photo-Secession

Balzac -- Towards the Light, Midnight, Meudon by Edward Steichen, 1901, photogravure.

Perhaps for sheer drama, the single most stunning photograph on display in this exhibit is Edward Steichen’s 1901 photogravure Balzac -- Towards the Light, Midnight, Meudon (taken from Camera Work, issue 34/35, April-July, 1911). In this exceedingly rare instance, three imaginative geniuses are at play in a single work of art.

First, of course, is the subject: The French novelist Honore Balzac (1799-1850). Then there is Auguste Rodin’s famed 1898 sculpture that controversially pushed the limits of figurative sculpture itself. And finally, there is Steichen’s inspired photograph catalyzing the image of the novelist through the creativity of the sculptor.

This blaze of innovation is precisely what Steichen captures through his photogravure: neither the real likeness of Balzac nor a mere reproductive illustration of Rodin’s effort. Rather, what Steichen captures is the ability of photography to connect ingenuity and verisimilitude. Crystalizing imagination with realism, he fuses -- through the guise of one memorable image -- the photographer’s ability to take reality one step further than any other artform. It’s a bold standard the likes of which photographers continue to aspire to our day.


John Carlos Cantú has written on our community's visual arts in a number of different periodicals.


University of Michigan Museum of Art: “The Aesthetic Movement in America: Artists of the Photo-Secession” runs through March 5, 2017. UMMA, 525 S. State St., is open Tuesday-Saturday 11 am–5 pm and Sunday 12–5 pm. For information, call 734-764.0395.