About "the Alfred Stieglitz Collection" on view at the FISK Museum

Spring Showers, New York,1900
Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) was at the center of the American avant-garde and great changes in American art during the first half of the 20th century. From the 1890s to the 1940s, Stieglitz was arguably the most influential figure associated with modern art in the United States. America’s first great art photographer, he almost single-handedly established photography as a fine art, developed an audience for modern art, and financially supported and promoted many of America’s earliest modern artists through three very influential galleries he operated. Stieglitz founded and edited two influential photography magazines and assembled the first great collection of modern art in the United States, which consisted of more than 800 objects, not including his own photographs. He was also first in America to promote an appreciation of traditional African artifacts as works of art, not primitive curiosities. Stieglitzwas the impresario of the modern art movement in America..........

The Stieglitz Collection illustrates Stieglitz’s broad involvement in the modern art movement and his personal ties to many of America’s early modernists. From 1905 to 1917, Stieglitz owned and operated The Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession at 291Fifth Avenue in New York City, where he generated great excitementand controversy for the “new art”. At 291, Stieglitz surrounded himself with a group of artists who embraced modernist ideas, styles, and subjects unique to America. Fisk’s Stieglitz Collection features iconic works by Stieglitz and many of the artists in his circle, most notably, John Marin (1870–1953), Marsden Hartley (1877–1943), Arthur Dove (1880–1946), and O’Keeffe. Stieglitz promoted their works and art by other carefully selected artists until his death through two later galleries, The Intimate Gallery (1925–29) and An American Place (1929–46). He also championed and collected works
by European modernists, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906), Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) and Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) among many others, who he began introducing to American audiences in the teens at 291. In 1914,
Stieglitz pioneered the appreciation of African tribal objects as art through exhibitions that featured masks and statues as important artistic achievements and as source material for the modernists. Stieglitz’s visionary efforts were central to establishing modern art in the United States.
A new spirit enveloped American life at the dawn of the 20th century. It was a spirit of change, of dissent, of revolution, of hopefulness. New directions seemed possible in politics, the arts and in the quality of life as a whole. Institutions and established ways were subjected to critical reappraisals. Experimentation replaced acquiescence to received customs and traditions. Alfred Stieglitz embodied this new spirit more than any of his contemporaries working in the arts. At a time
when American culture was redefining its fundamental ways of seeing, thinking and experiencing the world, Stieglitz's seminal role as artist and art impresario defined him as a singular force for shaping a new American vision of the arts and culture. The Alfred Stieglitz Collection offers an extraordinary introduction to Stieglitz — the artist and collector — his circle, and early modernism in America and Europe. Broad in its scope, the Stieglitz Collection is one of finest groupings of early modern art in the United States as well as an outstanding window onto this period of great change in American art and culture.