EXHIBITIONS
PORTICO FA L L 2 0 1 2
steichen
and portraiture
Nancy Huth, Curator of Education
In his work for Vanity Fair and Vogue, as seen in the
exhibition Star Power: Edward Steichen’s Glamour
Photography, Edward Steichen turned his considerable
talents to fashion and celebrity photography. He
transformed the typical Hollywood publicity shot and the
early documentary style of fashion photography into a
new form of artistic photographic portraiture.
Born in Luxembourg in 1879, Steichen was three when
his family immigrated to America. As a teenager, the
artistically inclined youth turned to the public library to
teach himself about painting and photography, intending
to practice both. Along with books on Whistler and
Monet, he studied issues of the photographic journal
Camera Notes, published by the Camera Club of New
York and edited by Alfred Stieglitz. In an 1898 article in
Camera Notes, photographer F. Holland Day encouraged
readers to look at the works of Rembrandt, Velasquez,
and Titian, among others. In the spring of 1900 with
savings from his salary at a lithographic firm, Steichen
boarded a ship to Paris where he spent many hours in art
museums and galleries.
1
“
Make Vogue
a Louvre.
6
―Edward Steichen
”
Along with landscape and still-life subjects, Steichen
was committed to photographic portraiture from his
earliest experiments with the camera. As a young man,
he conceived of a series of photographs of “great men.”
The sculptor Auguste Rodin was one of his first subjects.
Throughout his career, Steichen would photograph many
“great men” on commission, including President Theodore
Roosevelt and Republican presidential candidate William
Howard Taft.
In 1923 when publisher Condé Nast offered Steichen
the job of chief photographer for Vanity Fair and fashion
assignments for Vogue, the photographer would have
Claudette Colbert’s seated, three-quarter-turned pose
of 1927 calls to mind Frans Hals’s Portrait of a Seated
Woman Holding a Fan of about 1650. Both Steichen’s
1930 portrait of Gary Cooper and Hals’s portrait of
Michiel de Wael (about 1632–34) ooze with masculine
attitude and feature three-quarter-length standing figures.
The photographer’s 1933 image of Leslie Howard shares
the casually slouching, smoking pose of John Singer
Sargent’s 1887 portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson.
had a mental storehouse of painted portraits upon
which to draw when composing his fashion and celebrity
photographs. Author Tobia Bezzola wrote that Steichen
“look[ed] to the traditions of painting.” His photographs
for Vanity Fair and Vogue “all reflect his determination to
use the formal potential of great painting to breathe new
life into the ‘lesser’ genres of photographic portraiture
and fashion photography—by means of a greater dynamic
intensity, a more reflective mode of composition, and a use
of light that is designed to be more than merely descriptive.”
In a 1926 letter to Vogue Editor-in-Chief Edna Woolman
Chase, Steichen entreated her to “make Vogue a Louvre.”
Little did he know he was also making Vogue and Vanity
Fair into a Taft Museum of Art.
Painted portraits provided Steichen with an endless
repertoire of poses, compositions, and lighting solutions.
Comparing Steichen’s fashion and celebrity portraits with
works in the Taft collection reveals some of the devices
he borrowed from paintings. The 1929 portrait of the
French entertainer Maurice Chevalier, caught mid-dance
step, reflects the kind of unexpected action seen in such
paintings as Rembrandt’s Portrait of a Man Rising from His
Chair of 1633 in the Taft collection. Both Rembrandt and
Steichen used light and white details of clothing to draw
attention to their subjects’ faces and hands.
3
4
1 Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of a Man Rising from His Chair, 1633, oil on
canvas. Taft Museum of Art
2 Edward Steichen, French Actor and Singer Maurice Chevalier, 1929,
gelatin silver print. Courtesy Condé Nast Archive, New York
3 Frans Hals, Portrait of Michiel de Wael, about 1632–34, oil on canvas.
Taft Museum of Art
2
4 Edward Steichen, Actor Gary Cooper, 1930, gelatin silver print. Courtesy
Condé Nast Archive, New York