Loading editorial discovery…
Artist
Alfred Stieglitz
American photographer and gallery owner who championed photography as fine art and introduced European modernism to American audiences through his 291 gallery.
1643 works in the NGA collection
Search Alfred Stieglitz worksAlfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) spent forty years arguing, mostly successfully, that a photograph could be a work of art rather than a record. He argued it in print through the journal Camera Work, and in practice through the New York galleries he ran, of which 291 is the best known: it gave American audiences their first sight of Cézanne, Picasso, Matisse, and Brancusi, alongside the photographers he was promoting.
His own photography moved from soft-focus, weather-obscured city scenes toward something sharper and more austere: the Manhattan skyline going up outside his window, clouds photographed as pure form, and the long series of portraits of Georgia O'Keeffe, whom he met in 1916 and married in 1924. Those portraits treat a single sitter across years and body parts as a cumulative subject, closer in method to his cloud studies than to conventional portraiture.
After his death O'Keeffe placed the key set, the most complete surviving collection of his finished photographs, at the National Gallery of Art. It runs to more than 1,600 prints, which makes this the deepest Stieglitz holding anywhere and the reason his work dominates the photography section of this collection.
Works in the collection
![A Snapshot, Paris [horse] by Alfred Stieglitz](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/204631.webp)
![A Snapshot; Paris [street scene] by Alfred Stieglitz](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/149583.webp)
Georgia Engelhard, Georgia O'Keeffe, Selma Stieglitz Schubart, and Joseph Obermeyer
1920/1922
![Ida and Georgia O'Keeffe [recto] by Alfred Stieglitz](https://pub-195741b7cda1474594e199ae97fdd720.r2.dev/thumbnails/60170.webp)
Ma, Aunt Rosa, Selma, Ag, Emmy, Ralph Bernheim, Hans Wetzler and Minnie Wetzler, Lake George
1895, printed 1895/1896
Sime Herrmann, Mr. and Mrs. Mann, Dr. Brown, Mr. McGibbon, Miss Linthicum and Emmy—On Board the Bourgogne May 5–14, 1896
1894, printed 1895/1896
Sunday Afternoon—From My Window, 1111 Madison Avenue, Looking South
probably 1901, printed 1929/1932
Sunday, Fifth Avenue and Fifty-Seventh Street, New York
probably 1893, printed 1929/1934
Collection data via NGA Open Access (CC0)
Find visually similar works