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Description: flush-mounted, mounted again to board, in a white metal American Place-style frame, Gerald Peters Gallery, Santa Fe, and Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, labels on the reverse, 1935

PROVENANCE

Christie's New York, 8 April 1993, Lot 343

Acquired from the above by Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York

Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1993
LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Greenough 1570
CATALOGUE NOTE

In Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set; The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs (National Gallery of Art, 2002), Sarah Greenough cites only one print of this image, that in the "key set" of Stieglitz images at the National Gallery of Art. Aside from the print offered here, no other prints of this image have been located as of this writing.

This photograph was made from Stieglitz's window at the Shelton Club Hotel, where the photographer maintained a winter residence, along with Georgia O'Keeffe, from 1924 to 1935. The building, which stands at 525 Lexington Avenue, between 48^th and 49^th Streets, was designed by Arthur Loomis Harris and was, at the time of its completion in 1924, the tallest hotel in the world. Both Stieglitz and O'Keeffe found inspiration in the panoramic views offered by their small apartment on the 30^th floor. O'Keeffe set up her painting studio in the living room, which faced north and east, and Stieglitz used the elevated vantage point to make a new series of photographs of the city that had played such a significant role in his earlier work.

Through careful examination of the positions of individual window shades in the Newsweek Building?the central building--in this image, Sarah Greenough has placed this photograph within a series of four exposures made by Stieglitz in rapid succession in a single morning (cf. Greenough 1567, 1568, and 1569). Of the four photographs made on this day, the image offered here is notable for the fact that it alone captures the passage of clouds in the sky. These clouds, along with the progressively stepped blocks of shadows cast upon the buildings, introduce the element of time to the image.

The city had long provided subject matter for Stieglitz, persisting though his shifts in aesthetic position, but the views he executed in the 1930s, from the windows of his apartment at the Shelton and his American Place gallery, represent a departure from earlier work. Sarah Greenough writes,

'The 1930s photographs of New York City have their roots, of course, in Steiglitz's earlier views of the city, especially those made from the back window of 291. And they are surely influenced by - or at any rate, certainly in the same spirit as - the 1930s paintings and photographs of New York by Sheeler, Strand, and O'Keeffe. But Stieglitz's photographs also surpass their predecessors, and they do so by incorporating the aspirations and understandings of the Equivalents. Sheeler's paintings of New York, for example, are so clean, so precise, that one knows that they could never exist in reality. Stieglitz's photographs of New York, however, are of a very real world in which time and the passage of time are central and crucial elements' (Alfred Stieglitz, p. 25).

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Dimensions: 9 1/2 by 7 1/2 in. (24.1 by 19 cm.)