Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903 (Heft 2))

A VISIT TO STEICHEN’S STUDIO.
A DARK, CHILLY December afternoon. The rain falls in thin,
straight lines on the streets of New York, and the lighted
shop-windows are reflected, like some blurred and golden
dream, on the slushy pavement.
YOU mount the slippery iron stairs of a humble and reticent
office-building on Fifth Avenue. To the negro, who comes to your ring,
you say: “Mr. Steichen.” He takes you up to the top floor, and
carelessly, indifferently, as one points to a door, he points to the right.
"Right in there, sir,” he says.
YOU knock at the door. It is Mr. Steichen who admits you. It is a
plain little room, without skylight, but with an artistic atmosphere of its
own. The first impression is one of cool grays and pale terra-cotta, a studio
void of furniture, but full of artistic accessories — a vagrom place, where a
sort of orderly disorder, a sort of gipsy fashion prevails. The light of
the waning day seems to rest in the center of the walls, while the corners
are filled with twilight shadows, whose monotony is only here and there
relieved by the color-notes of a Japanese lantern, a large brass vessel, or
some other quaint accessory. A little plaster fragment of one of Rodin’s
statues hangs in proud isolation over the mantelpiece.
MR. Steichen looms tall among his canvases, his arms crossed. With his
square shoulders, his pallid, angular face, his dark, disheveled hair, his
steady eyes, he reminds one of some old statue carved of wood, a quaint
personality which has at times the air of some classical visionary, " a modern
citizen of Calais,” and at other times the deportment of some gallant figure
of Sir Reynolds's time.
HE showed me his paintings, sketches, and photographs in rapid succession,
which is one of those ordeals the art critic has to go through if he wants
to become acquainted with a new man. I have probably passed through
this severe experience oftener than any other man. I remember of having
visited at least four hundred and fifty American studios for a similar
purpose—as I have convinced myself that it is the only way to get at a
man’s individuality. And art criticism is to me nothing but a peculiar
mania for searching in every expression of art, and life as well, for its most
individual, perhaps innermost, essence.
BIOGRAPHICAL data do not interest me. What is the difference
where a man is born, how old he is, where he studied, and where he was
medaled? His art must speak—that is all I care for.
THE first picture that attracted my attention in Steichen’s studio was his
Beethoven. It is all black and gray, huge and grim (though no canvas of
colossal size) almost Doric in its severity. Everything is sacrificed to the
idea, a study in the somber supremacy of genius and the martyrdom of
the artist. It is the Beethoven of the Fifth, not of the Ninth, Symphony.
It contains more strength and power than beauty. The simplicity of its
composition is remarkable. The dark pyramidal shape of a seated figure.

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