Edward Steichen Is Dead at 93; Made Photography an Art Form

By Alden Whitman March 26, 1973

Edward Steichen, the photographer, died yesterday at his home in West Redding, Conn., after an illness of several months. He would have been 94 years old tomorrow.

Mr. Steichen, the country's most celebrated and highestpriced photographer, was hailed as a craftsman of genius who transformed his medium into an art.

A humanist, he disclosed and interpreted man through probing portraiture, and as a person of extraordinary sensitivity, he gave his century a new vision of flowers, trees, insects and cityscapes as well as of commercial artifacts.

His first photographs, taken as a boy of 16, were so disappointing that they were almost his last. He had bought a Kodak with his mother's money and made 50 exposures, chiefly of subjects about the house.

“When the film came back, I had a real shock,” he recalled. “Only one picture in the lot had been considered clear enough to print.

“My father thought one picture out of 50 was a hopeless proposition, but my mother said the picture [of his sister at the piano] was so beautiful and so wonderful that it was worth 49 failures.”

Brightened by his mother's cheerful attitude, the youth went on to teach himself photography, experimenting as he learned. He came to use a camera lens like a painter's brush. His pictures possessed mood and emotion, and they Were composed with a keen sense of design, a heritage of his years as a fashionable painter in the manner of Whistler and Sargent.

Like Impressionist Works

Some of his photographs resembled French impressionist paintings in their blurred softness; some, in their use of light and shadow, seemed like Rem, brandt; others were utterly stark, as if they had been executed by De Chirico. Few of his pictures were dull or jaded.

“I know that to him the universe is as fresh and as strange now as it was back then,” Carl Sandburg said a few years ago of Mr. Steichen, his brother‐in‐law and longtime friend.

Explaining his conception of his art, Mr. Steichen put it this way:

“I don't think any medium is an art in itself. It is the person who creates a work of art. It's perfectly clear that photography is different from any other medium — but that's only procedurally.

“Every other artist begins from scratch, a blank canvas, a piece of paper, and gradually builds up the conception he has. The photographer begins with the finished product. When that shutter clicks, anything else that can be done afterward is not worth consideration.

“At that point the differences between photography and any other medium stop because the photographer has brought to that instant anything any artist has to bring into action for the creative act.”

In line with this view, Mr. Steichen concentrated on preparation. He once took more than 1,000 shots of a single cup and saucer as he experimented with the effects of various lighting arrangements. It was this infinite pain — and the knowledge that it produced — that gave his pictures their special quality.

His picture of Auguste Rodin, the sculptor, was a case in point. Before taking the photograph, Mr. Steichen spent every Saturday for a year studying Rodin as he walked among his works at his Paris studio; and only when he had decided on the composition he wanted did he bring his camera.

Scrutinized 10,000 Prints

Mr. Steichen was almost as famous as a picture editor as he was as a picture taker. In 1942, in World War II, he set up the exhibition “Road to Victory” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He scrutinized 10,000 prints before selecting 150 that he believed reflected the quality and spirit of the American people, their land and their resources.

Ten years later, as director of the museum's department of photography, he traveled to 11 countries in search of material for the “Family of Man” exhibition. He selected 503 pictures as, he said, a “mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.” The exhibition opened in 1955 and was ultimately viewed by more than 9 million people in 69 lands. In book form, “They Family of Man'” sold 3 million copies.

Outside of photography, Mr. Steichen achieved a more lim ited renown for his crossbreeding of plants, especially delphiniums, in which he had been interested since 1910. His delphiniums sprouted flowerr so profusely that they resembled bushes rather than the usual spires. He also developed a new type of oriental poppy, more delicate and smaller than the usual flower.

Six feet tall and with wideset blue eyes, Mr. Steichen was not a jocose person. “On looks Steichen might be taken for a priest,” Mr. Sandburg wrote in 1929. “He is solemn, with grave spiritual quality; reverence is a commanding element in his make‐up.”

Starting in 1957, the photographer altered his visage by growing a magnificent white beard that was flecked with gray and black. It gave him the appearance of a biblical patriarch, especially when he neglected to trim it regularly.

Even as an old man he had the questing, eager mind that set him apart as a youth.

Edouard (it became Edward early in his career) Jean Steichen was born March 27, 1879, in Luxembourg, the only son of. Jean Pierre and Marie Kemp Steichen. Three years later the family, migrated to Hancock, Mich., where the elder Steichen worked in the copper mines and his wife had a millinery shop. Their daughter, Lilian Paula, who became Mrs. Sandburg, was born in Hancock. She survives her brother.

Edward's mother was the dominant influence in his childhood, shaping an outlook on the world that remained with him through his life. Recalling an instance of this in his autobiography, “A Life in Photography,” he wrote:

“Once, when I was 10 years old, I came home from school, and as I was entering the door of her millinery shop I turned back and shouted into the street, ‘You dirty little kike!’

“My mother called me over to the counter where she was serving customers and asked me what it was that I had called out. With innocent frankness, I repeated the insulting remark. She requested the customers to excuse her, locked the door of the shop and took me upstairs to our apartment.

Important Moment

“There, she talked to me quietly and earnestly for a long, long time, explaining that all people were alike regardless of race, creed, or color. She talked about the evils of bigotry and intolerance.

“This was possibly the most important single moment in my growth toward manhood, and it was certainly on that day the seed was sown that, 66 years later, grew into an exhibition called ‘The Family of Man.’”

After the family moved to Milwaukee, Edward left school at the age of 15 and became an apprentice in lithography at the American Fine Art Company, working up from nothing a week the first year to $4 the fourth. He added to his pay by becoming the unofficial photographer of picnics and outings. He also painted and sketched in his spare hours.

As a lithographer, the youth made his mark by creating a large Ruben's like woman reclining in the enlarged capital “C” of the slogan “Cascarets—They Work While You Sleep.” The figure of the languorous lady was almost as famous as the Gibson Girl.

At the same time he was experimenting with his camera, trying to capture on film the blurred softness of a painting. To achieve a misty effect, he would spit on his lens or give the tripod a kick as he tripped the shutter. One of these outof‐focus pictures, “The Lady in the Doorway,” brought him recognition as a photographer in the Second Philadelphia Salon in 1899.

A year later he was on his way to Paris, intending to study painting and to continue with photography, the latter in line with a promise to Alfred Stieglitz, a photographic pioneer, whom Mr. Steichen had met in passing through New York.

Noted for Portraits

Painting and photographing by turns, he built a reputation for portraiture of notables —his Rodin won a prize, and his picture of Maurice Maeterlink, the poet and playwright, was highly regarded. Returning to New York in 1902, he became friendly with Mr. StiegLitz, opened a studio at 291 Fifth Avenue and began doing portraits commercially.

His “most concentrated and exciting experience” was in snapping J. P. Morgan and Eleonora Duse, the actress, in less than an hour. The Morgan picture came about accidentally when a painter, finding the financier too restive for a sitting, got Mr. Steichen to take a picture from which to paint.

Using a janitor as a stand‐in, Mr. Steichen composed the picture before the banker arrived and quickly made a two‐second exposure. Then he made another exposure for himself, with a different position of the hands and head that brought out Morgan's dynamic self‐assertion.

Morgan liked the picture taken for the portrait, for which he paid $500, but tore up a print of the second exposure. Later, though, when he was told how wonderful it was, he offered $5,000 for it.

In 1905, Mr. Steichen, with Mr. Stieglitz, established the Photo‐Secession Galleries, where art works of all mediums were shown. Through it, Mr. Steichen introduced Cdzanne, Picasso, Rodin and Matisse to the United States. But, restless and feeling stultified as a professional portrait photographer, Mr. Steichen returned to Paris in 1906 and devoted himself to painting, photography and botany at his home in Voulangis.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917, the photographer volunteered for service as an aerial cameraman with the Signal Corps. He took part in major operations in France and won both a bistinguished Service Citation and membership in the Legion of Honor. With the Armistice he returned to Voulangis and his palette.

“One morning, when I went to my studio, I found a very free copy of a flower painting II had been working on,” he recounted. “It had been done by he gardener, a Brittany peas??nt, and it had the curious charm and direct simplicity of much primitive painting. As such, it was better than what I had been trying to do.

“I called the gardener, and we pulled all the paintings out of my studio into an open area and made a bonfire. I was through with painting.

“The wartime problem of making sharp, clear pictures from a vibrating, speeding plane 10,000 to 20,000 feet in the air had brought me a new kind of technical interest in photography ... Now I wanted to know all that could be expected from photography.”

Mr. Steichen spent three years in experimentation. His pictures became precise, filled with detail and with light and shadow. And in 1923 he signed to do portrait and fashion photography for Vanity Fair and Vogue magazines for $35,000 a year. Among those who posed for him over the years were Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Beatrice Lillie, Mary Pickford, Martha Graham, the Barrymores, Katharine Cornell, Paul Robeson and Lillian Gish.

Worked for Ad Agency

Branching out from the Conde Nast Publications, Mr. Steichen took commissions from the J. Walter Thompson agency for advertising work. He promoted such things as mattresses, creams, silks, pills and vacuum cleaners. He was often reproached for going commercial, but he steadfastly denied any meretriciousness.

“If my technique, imagination and vision are any good I ought to be able to put the best values of my noncommercial and experimental photographs into a pair of shoes, a tube of toothpaste, a jar of face cream, a mattress or any object I want to light up and make humanly interesting in an advertising photograph,” he once said. He added:

“A thing is beautiful if it fulfills its purpose, if it functions. To my mind, a modern icebox is a thing of beauty.”

In 1938, however, he closed his New York studio, announcing that his work had become routine and repetitious. He did not retire, but spent more time with delphiniums (“my vital preoccupation”) at his Umpawaug Breeding Farm in West Redding.

When World War II broke out, he organized a unit to photograph naval aviation operations. By the end of the war he was in charge of all Navy combat photography. He was discharged in 1946 with the rank of captain. His war experiences are recorded in “The Blue Ghost: A Photographic Log and Personal Narrative of the Aircraft Carrier U.S.S. Lexington in Combat Operations.” He also supervised the film “The Fighting Lady.”

For 15 years, from 1947 to 1962, he was with the Museum of Modern Art, supervising exhibitions of photography. To achieve objectivity, he virtually gave up his own work in those years. The museum honored him in 1961 with a one‐man show of 300 pictures taken from more than 30,000 negatives. It later established the Edward Steichen Photography Center.

After he retired from the museum, he produced a documentary show on the plight of the farmer during the Depression. It opened in 1962 as “The Bitter Years: 1935–41 — Rural America as Seen by the Photographers of the Farm Security Administration.”

Mr. Steichen, even in his advanced years, never gave up photography completely. On his farm in recent years he experimented with a movie camera filming a flowering shadblow tree. The result was a start lingly beautiful chronology o its moods and seasons.

At his 90th birthday party at the Plaza Hotel in 1969, Mr Steichen took the floor to say.

“When I first became inter ested in photography, I though it was the whole cheese. Mr idea was to have it recognized as one of the fine arts. Today I don't give a hoot in hell about that. The mission of photography is to explain man to ma?? and each man to himself. And that is no mean function. Ma?? is the most complicated thin on earth and also as naive a a tender plant.”

Received Many Honors

He received many award and decorations, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom the Distinguished Service Medal and decorations from France and Luxembourg. At the end of this month he was to be honored at the Birmingham (Ala.) Art Festival.

Mr. Steichen married three times. His first wife was the former Clara E. Smith. They were married in 1903 and had two daughters, Dr. Mary Stelchen Calderone, a physicial and co‐founder of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, and Kate Rodina Steichen, a writes After a divorce in 1921, he married Dana Desboro Glover an actress, who died in 1957 In 1960, he married Joanna Taub, a woman in her twenties.

They lived in West Reddin in a Steichen‐designed house on property strewn with rocks. Under one, a large perpendicular boulder, he said, he hoped to be buried.

A memorial service will be held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at a date to be announced.

Source: New York Times; 26 Mar 1973

Edward Steichen (1899)