BENTONVILLE - The Alfred Stieglitz Collection will make its Arkansas debut this fall, more than a year after a Tennessee judge approved an agreement for Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to share the art collection with Fisk University in Nashville, the original benefactor.
The decision ended a seven-year legal battle waged in Tennessee courts while officials with the Bentonville museum waited for the outcome. Tennessee’s attorney general argued that selling any part of the 101-piece collection was against the wishes of Georgia O’Keeffe, the prominent painter and Stieglitz’s wife. She donated the collection in Stieglitz’s honor to Fisk University, a historically black college, in 1949.
Two of O’Keeffe’s works - her 1927 iconic painting Radiator Building - Night, New York (1927) and Flying Backbone (1944) - are included in the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, as well as a 1904 oil painting by Pablo Picasso, two color lithographs by Auguste Renoir and works by American modernist artists Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Arthur Dove, the latter being members of a group known as “The Stieglitz Circle.”
The modernist era has been described as a time when bright colors entered the palettes of painters and the first nonobjective paintings were displayed in galleries.
“Stieglitz was not only a great admirer of modernist work, but he also patronized and promoted artists he felt were most important in developing an American version of modernism,” said Kevin Murphy, curator of American art at Crystal Bridges.
Whether or not their work was selling, Stieglitz featured his American modernist friends in the internationally known New York galleries that he ran in the early part of the 20th century. Stieglitz also is known for bringing cutting-edge European art to America for the first time.
“The Artists’ Eye: Georgia O’Keeffe and the Alfred Stieglitz Collection” will be on display at Crystal Bridges from Nov. 9 through Feb. 14. Admission to the museum and the exhibition is free.
Crystal Bridges paid $30 million for its half interest in the Alfred Stieglitz Collection, about half of which Fisk placed in its permanent restricted endowment, according to a news release from the university in August, when the deal was finalized. Fisk’s new president, H. James Williams, has said the school’s financial situation is worse than he thought it was before taking the job and that the university’s accreditation is in jeopardy. Williams said Tuesday that he believes the school’s probationary status will be lifted by the end of the year.
The drawn-out court case cost Fisk $5.8 million in legal fees, and the operating agreement with Crystal Bridges required Fisk to set aside $3.9 million of the proceeds for the care and maintenance of the collection at the Carl Van Vechten Gallery at Fisk. Before Fisk put the collection up for sale in 2005, it was in storage for lack of funds to display it.
The sharing agreement between Fisk and Crystal Bridges also gives the museum first right of refusal of the remaining interest in the collection.
In addition to the legal battle in Tennessee, the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum - the legal guardians of her estate - sued to stop the sale to Crystal Bridges on the basis that the original bequest stipulated that the collection never be broken up or sold. The O’Keeffe Museum, in Santa Fe, N.M., later withdrew its lawsuit.
The gift to Fisk was one of six that O’Keeffe made on Stieglitz’s behalf after his death in 1946. She also divvied up Stieglitz’s collection among the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Library of Congress.
“Each one of the six gifts she carefully selected what was appropriate for each institution,” Murphy said. “We want to maintain that kind of respect for her selection process.”
Crystal Bridges has the collection at two-year intervals every two years, an arrangement that allows students in Nashville to enjoy and study the collection during their time as undergraduates.
“Fisk is a liberal-arts institution, and we do value the arts tremendously,” Williams said. “It’s a great opportunity for our students, given our focus on liberal arts, to be privy to the kinds of collections that we have.”
Ann Prentice Wagner, curator of drawings at the Arkansas Arts Center in Little Rock and a local authority on Stieglitz’s work, described Stieglitz as a leader in a photography movement called pictorialism, in which photographers attempted to make their photographs less like pictures and more like paintings, drawings or prints. He often purposefully blurred images, painted on them or altered negatives to achieve the desired effect.
Murphy, commenting on Stieglitz’s photographic style, added: “He really looks at the world through the camera lens with an abstract eye and is taking photographs of nature and of industrial objects and the city, but he’s doing it from interesting points of view that make you see it as an abstract kind of composition rather than a documentary-style of photograph.”
When the collection goes on display at Crystal Bridges, patrons will have the opportunity to see what is perhaps the most important photograph of Stieglitz’s career, The Steerage. He took the photograph en route by boat to Europe, aiming the camera at lower-class passengers in the bow of the ship.
Wagner noted that Stieglitz was less concerned with the story told by the photograph as he was the composition - the play of diagonals in the setting and the contrast of light against dark and vice versa.
“The people in steerage are not coming to America - they are people who have been rejected as immigrants and forced to return, with nothing, to their places of origin in Europe,” she said. “So the human story is a tragedy.
“But Stieglitz instead points out the strength of the technical composition and how he spotted the composition one day and ran back to his cabin to get his camera and his last unexposed glass plate,” Wagner said. Stieglitz had to wait until he arrived in Europe and could process the negative and print it before he knew if he had captured what he wanted.
“Obviously, he had,” she said.
“The Steerage was a major transitional work, and it became Stieglitz’s most famous work. He went on photographing with great vigor for decades but never surpassed the sheer visual strength of this signature work,” Wagner said.
Though Crystal Bridges has possession of the collection for two years, it’ll be available for public viewing for only a few months, Murphy said. After the exhibition closes, some selected works will be on display in the museum’s early-20th century gallery.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 04/24/2013