Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)

The Flat-Iron, 1903

Details

Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946)
The Flat-Iron, 1903
photogravure on Japan vellum, mounted on board
image: 12 7/8 x 6 5/8 in. (32.8 x 16.8 cm.)
sheet: 18 3/8 x 12 ½ in. (52.1 x 31.7 cm.)
mount: 20 ½ x 15 in. (52.2 x 38.1 cm.)

Provenance

The artist;
Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986);
Doris Bry (1921-2014), New York;
Paul Katz, New York (as agent);
The Gilman Paper Company, 1979;
Important Photographs from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Including Works from the Gillman Paper Company Collection, Sotheby's, New York, February 14 & 15, 2006, lot 3;
with Babcock Galleries, New York.

Literature

Camera Work, No. 4, April 1906, pl. I.
Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer, Random House, New York, 1973, pl. VII.
William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the American Avant-Garde, Bulfinch Press, Boston, 1977, pl. 9.
David Travis and Anne Kennedy, Photography Rediscovered: American Photographs, 1900-1930, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1979, pl. 154.
Richard Whelan, Stieglitz on Photography: His Selected Essays and Notes, Aperture, New York, 2000, p. 112.
Sarah Greenough et al., Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 2, pl. 26.
Sarah Greenough, Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set, Volume One 1886-1922, Abrams/National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 2002, p. 173, cat. no. 288.

Exhibited

Hanover, New Hampshire, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Winter, February - March 1986.

Lot Essay

In Alfred Stieglitz: The Key Set: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection of Photographs, Sarah Greenough locates six other versions of this print in institutional collections: The Art Institute of Chicago, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. According to Greenough, Stieglitz planned to include this image in a portfolio titled Fifty Prints of New York, a project that was never realized (Key Set, p. 173).

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