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Influences on Artist

Influenced by Artist

Open Influences

Close Influences

The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page.

In 1911, he was commissioned to take photographs for the French magazine Art et Décoration. Admiring of the boy's audacity, Steichen allowed him an appointment and bought three of the images. In this early period of his career, Steichen divided his time between impressionistic painting and photography. He was also troubled by practical and commercial concerns such as the fact that he needed to find a new printer for the photogravures for Camera Work, which had been printed hitherto in Germany.

The building of the title looms disconcertingly in the background, a large shadow in the centre of the frame. The Photo-Secession group dissolved around this time, and Steichen himself started to move into commercial photography. He commented that: "As a painter I was producing a high grade wall paper with a gold frame around it [...] we pulled all the paintings I had made out into the yard and we made a bonfire of the whole thing [...] it was a confirmation of my faith in photography, and the opening of a whole new world to me."

He and Clara divorced in 1922 after several years of acrimony.

She stands on uneven rock with some leaves of wild-plants in the foreground, but it is her billowing dress that grabs our attention. Given that they had no voice, it was the norm for silent film stars to convey their screen presence through their eyes. The renowned photography historian Beaumont Newhall put it perfectly when he said that "Armed with his mastery of technique, and with his brilliant sense of design and ability to grasp in an image the personality of a sitter, [Steichen] began to raise magazine illustrations to a creative level." Curators and art critics William A.

Ewing and Todd Brandow went further still when they suggested that Steichen "was among a tiny band of talented photographers who elevated celebrity portraiture from the status of formulaic publicity stills to an aesthetically sophisticated genre in its own right."

Through Steichen is primarily - and rightly - known through his photography, he was also crucial in bringing the works of highly distinguished French artists such as Rodin, Cézanne and Matisse to the United States.

The Steichen family moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1889, where, due to Jean-Pierre's deteriorating health, Marie took on the role of breadwinner, working as a milliner.

When he was fifteen, Steichen started an apprenticeship in lithography with the American Fine Art Company of Milwaukee. As for the images title, Steichen said "I conceived the building as a Maypole...to suggest the swirl of a Maypole dance" (a city centrepiece, indeed, around which the proud denizens of New York might come to rejoice).

They actually crackled. The illustrations are objective and free of emotion, almost scientific. A painter as well as a photographer, Steichen lived in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century, where he briefly studied at the Academie Julian and was also well acquainted with avant-garde artists such as Cezanne, Picasso, and Matisse. He met Jean Walker Simpson at Auguste Rodin's studio in Paris, and the two became close friends.

The image actually exists in three versions, each with a slightly different tone and feel, demonstrating how powerful color can be in altering mood.

It depicts the moon rising behind a clearing of trees, and then reflected onto a completely still pond. The most striking element of the picture are the Star's hypnotic eyes that look directly into ours. His landscape is "washed" in a color tone to form a finished mist-like effect. Steichen was thus commissioned by Vanity Fair to photograph the Empire State Building, at that time the world's tallest building, and arguably the modern world's greatest architectural achievement.