Estimated Price:

   $   

Realized Price:

   $   

What is this symbol? This symbol indicates that this auction hose has verified this price result.

Log in or subscribe to view price data

THE SPIRAL SHELL

measurements note
7 5/8 by 7 5/8 in. (19.4 by 19.4 cm.)

the 'Photograph by Edward Steichen, Printed from the original negative' stamp, and annotated 'FRANCE -- 1921,' 'RAREST,' 'Orig. print made by Edw. M. Steichen,' and numbered by Rolf Petersen in pencil on the reverse, matted, 1921

PROVENANCE

Graphics International, Ltd., Washington, D.C.

Acquired by the Gilman Paper Company from the above, 1979

LITERATURE

Other prints of this image:

Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York, 1963), cover and pl. 72

Joanna Steichen, Steichen's Legacy: Photographs, 1895 - 1973 (New York, 2000), pl. 231

NOTE

After serving in the Army Signal Corps Photographic Section in the First World War, Edward Steichen found himself at creative crossroads. Painting, in which he had previously invested a great deal of his energy, no longer satisfied him; indeed, this crisis resulted in Steichen's destruction of many of his paintings. He decided that photography should once again receive the full force of his creative energies, but felt he needed to approach the medium anew. In A Life in Photography, Steichen wrote that the experience of making aerial photographs during the war had changed his attitude toward photography: 'The problem of making, sharp, clear pictures from a vibrating, speeding airplane ten to twenty thousand feet in the air had brought me a new kind of technical interest in photography completely different from the pictorial interest I had had as a boy in Milwaukee and as a young man in the Photo-Secession days. Now I wanted to know all that could be expected from photography' (A Life in Photography, Chapter 5, unpaginated).

It was with this renewed sense of discovery that Steichen trained his camera upon the natural forms in his garden at Voulangis, France, and during this time he became fascinated with the recurring presence of spiral forms in nature. He wrote, 'for many years I had been impressed by the beauty of the spiral shell on the snails so abundant in our garden. Even the tiniest snail carried a house constructed in the perfect geometric form of the spiral. I found some form of the spiral in most succulent plants and in certain flowers' (ibid.).

Steichen, now obsessed, sought out writings by Leonardo Da Vinci and Goethe on the subject. Ultimately, he came upon Theodore Andrea Cook's The Curves of Life, Being an Account of Spiral Formations and Their Application to Growth in Nature (1914), which provided Steichen with the most satisfactory examination of the spiral, accounting for its proliferation in the natural world. 'From that time onward,' wrote Steichen, 'I began to feel sure that, one day, scientists would discover that the shape of the universe itself was a logarithmic spiral' (ibid.).

The Spiral Shell is Steichen's most overt photographic rendering of the spiral form. This was the image chosen for the dust jacket of his definitive autobiography, A Life in Photography.