“The Safeness of Standing Alone”: Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work, and the Organizational Roots of the American Avant-Garde

Erratum In Volume 28, no.2 (1998), in the article by J.M. Mancini, "'The Safeness of Standing Alone': Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work, and the Organizational Roots of the American Avant-Garde," the last paragraph of page 41 and the continuation of the paragraph on page 43 contained sentences that appeared in the wrong order. The paragraph correctly reads as follows, with the affected lines showing in bold font. Comprised of a Council, Fellows, and Associates, the Secession had room enough for collectors, writers, and other supporters, as well as photographers. While photographers always held a primary position within the organization, Stieglitz and his associates recognized the need to forge alliances with sympathetic nonpractitioners. Although the title "Associate" reinforced the distance between makers and mere auxiliaries, Camera Work's editors papered over this distinction by stressing the unity of purpose the two groups shared. 15 The editors did their best to lend cachet to supporting roles, moreover, by emphasizing the exclusiveness of their ranks and the difficulty of gaining entry therein. While claiming that associateship demanded "no requirements except sincere sympathy with the aims and motives of the Secession," the editors insisted that it must not be supposed that these qualifications will be assumed as a matter of course, as it has been found necessary to deny the application of many whose lukewarm interest in the cause with which we are so thoroughly identified gave no promise of aiding the Secession. Canadian Review of American Studies/ Revue canadienne d'etudes atnericaines Volume 28, Number 2, 1998, pp. 37-79 "The Safeness of Standing Alone": 37 Alfred Stieglitz, Camera Work, and the Organizational Roots of the American Avant-Garde J.M. Mancini The Secessionist Idea is neither the servant nor the product of a medium. It is a spirit. Let us say it is the Spirit of the Lamp; the old and discolored, the too frequently despised, the too often discarded lamp of honesty; honesty of aim, honesty of self-expression, honesty of revolt against the autocracy of convention. The Photo-Secession is not the keeper of this Lamp, but lights it when it may[.] ("The Editors' Page," Camera Work 18 (April 1907), 37) The Secessionists care little for popular approval, insisting upon works, not faith, and believing that their share having been done in producing the work, the public must now do the rest. A few friends, and these of understanding mind, a few true appreciators, this is all they expect and all they desire. (Hartmann 1904, 47) 38 Stieglitz, "Seer" and Organizer Canadian Review of American Studies Revue canadiemze d'etudes americaines By many accounts, modern art arrived on American shores sometime after 1905, due in large part to the efforts of photographer Alfred Stieglitz. If the 1913 Armory Show (and its peevish public reception) marked modernism's official American coming-out party, Stieglitz's intimate exhibits of works by Rodin, Matisse, and Picasso between 1905 and 1912 served as the new art's formal letter of introduction to a smaller and more powerful viewersh1p (Dijkstra 1969, Homer 1977, Zilczer 1985). Not merely an importer but an artist in his own right, Stieglitz has also been widely credited with transforming photography into one of the primary venues for modernist experimentation in the United States (Orvell 1989; Haines 1982), 1 a transformation which parallelled Frank Lloyd Wright's drive in architecture towards avernacular American modernism (Crunden 1982, 133-62). Although scholars disagree on the degree to which Stieglitz himself initiated American photography 's turn away from the academic, pictorialist style of the turn of the century towards the hard-edged, geometric productions of the following decades (Arrowsmith and West 1992; Bunnell 1993, 1-38; Homer 1983; Peterson 1993; Petruck 1981; Watson 1991), few have denied Stieglitz and the photographic school he engendered a central place in the pantheon of American visual modernism. 2 Yet, Stieglitz's talent as an artist and connoisseur of the new only partially explains his success within the art world, both occluding his relationship to his predecessors and prohibiting a more nuanced understanding of photographic modernism's emergence and rise to preeminence in the United States.3 Stieglitz's proficiency as an art-world organizer, as...