Release Date: March 13, 2000

National Gallery of Art Launches Online Tours of Alfred Stieglitz Photography Collection

Washington, DC—The National Gallery of Art has launched Alfred Stieglitz: New Perspectives, a series of seven online study tours of the work and life of Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946), one of the most influential photographers and gallery directors of the twentieth century. Introduced on the Gallery's Web site on 15 September 1999, with Stieglitz's last photographs of New York City, the current tour features Stieglitz's Lake George photographs taken from 1915 to 1937.

The online tours are part of the Gallery's four-year-long STIEGLITZ project, a multi-faceted endeavor to make the art of this seminal photographer more widely known. STIEGLITZ is made possible by Eastman Kodak Company, whose innovative sponsorship enables the Gallery to present his photographs in a variety of media to an international audience.

Alfred Stieglitz: New Perspectives can be reached on the Gallery's Web site at www.nga.gov by selecting "Stieglitz" or "online tours" on the home page. The tours can also be reached directly at www.nga.gov/feature/stieglitz/asmain.htm. The site will feature a new online tour every four months through January 2002. Each tour examines a specific subject or period in Stieglitz's career and features fifteen to twenty-five images from the Gallery's Alfred Stieglitz Collection. Accompanying text introduces new insights into the development of Stieglitz's art and ideas, such as the galleries he directed and the exhibitions he organized; technical information, including descriptions of his printing processes and cameras, which will be expanded with each tour; and a bibliography for additional research.

Current Online Tour:
Lake George, 1915-1937, online through 15 May, showcases 26 photographs taken at or near the Stieglitz family's summer home. They represent some of Stieglitz's most technically accomplished and aesthetically nuanced photographs. In addition to landscape photographs, the tour includes casual studies of friends and family made with a small, hand-held, four-by-five-inch Graflex camera and formal portraits, taken with an eight-by-ten-inch view camera. Of particular interest are excerpts from a letter Stieglitz sent Sherwood Anderson, describing the 1923 snowstorm that was the setting for several of the featured photographs.

Subsequent tours will feature:

Clouds (1922 - 1934)

Georgia O'Keeffe: A Portrait (1917 - 1936)

Portraits (1907 - 1923)

New York City (1892 - 1917)

Europe (1887 - 1894)

Biography:
Alfred Stieglitz worked for more than fifty years to achieve the acceptance of photography as a valid form of artistic expression. He organized the Photo-Secession, a group of photographers whose work he used to demonstrate the artistic possibilities of the medium; published several periodicals; and exhibited photographs, avant-garde painting, and sculpture at his three New York galleries. He mounted the first American exhibitions of Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne, among others, and championed the work of American artists, such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, and Paul Strand.

Books and Exhibition:
In addition to the online study tours, STIEGLITZ includes a new edition of the Gallery's award-winning 1983 book, Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs & Writings released in August 1999; and a definitive scholarly catalogue including reproductions of all photographs in the Gallery's Alfred Stieglitz Collection, to be released in 2002. The project will culminate in the spring of 2002 in an exhibition of rarely seen photographs by Stieglitz from the Gallery's collection.

Stieglitz Collection:
The National Gallery of Art's Alfred Stieglitz Collection, the most complete holding of the photographer's work in existence, includes 1,600 photographs donated to the Gallery in 1949 and 1980 by Georgia O'Keeffe, the photographer's wife. The collection, spanning Stieglitz's entire career from the 1880s to the 1930s, contains the finest example of every mounted print in Stieglitz's possession at the time of his death.

Organization:
STIEGLITZ is organized by the National Gallery of Art and supervised by Sarah Greenough, the Gallery's curator of photographs, in consultation with Juan Hamilton.