Lot Essay
Photographing from the windows of his home and galleries was a motif Alfred Stieglitz returned to consistently throughout his career. As early as 1902 he began the series which he contributed to up until he stopped making photographs in 1937 (Alfred Stieglitz, p. 16, N. 13; see also Christie's, New York, April 8, 1993, Lot 343).
At the time Out of Window - 291 - N.Y. was made, Stieglitz's work was in transition, becoming more concerned with the formal qualities of the medium as the influence of European Modernism became stronger. Sarah Greenough, in Alfred Stieglitz writes: [Stieglitz], like de Zayas, believed that direct, pure photography could reveal the objective reality of form, that it was not the function of photography to give aesthetic pleasure, but to provide visual "truths" about the world. ...It is thus no coincidence that in the winter of 1915-1916 Stieglitz made a series of extremely formal and objective photographs from the back window of '291'. Made at night and in the snow, they are reminescent of his photographs of New York from the turn of the century. But in the earlier works darkness and weather softened the rigid lines and angles of the city, making it more picturesque; in these they intensify shapes and patterns. Compositionally these pictures are also reminiscent of some of his 1900 photographs of the city: in Outward Bound, The Mauretania or The City of Ambition (See: Lot 4) Stieglitz included objects, in the foreground, cropped by the bottom of the picture frame, whose shapes are repeated in the middle and background. She adds: And in their compression of space, their simplified geometric forms, and the resulting tension between two-dimensional surface and three-dimensional objects, these 1915-1916 photographs taken from 291 clearly reflect Stieglitz's understanding of cubism (Alfred Stieglitz, pp. 20-21).
Other prints of this image are in the "key set" of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
At the time Out of Window - 291 - N.Y. was made, Stieglitz's work was in transition, becoming more concerned with the formal qualities of the medium as the influence of European Modernism became stronger. Sarah Greenough, in Alfred Stieglitz writes: [Stieglitz], like de Zayas, believed that direct, pure photography could reveal the objective reality of form, that it was not the function of photography to give aesthetic pleasure, but to provide visual "truths" about the world. ...It is thus no coincidence that in the winter of 1915-1916 Stieglitz made a series of extremely formal and objective photographs from the back window of '291'. Made at night and in the snow, they are reminescent of his photographs of New York from the turn of the century. But in the earlier works darkness and weather softened the rigid lines and angles of the city, making it more picturesque; in these they intensify shapes and patterns. Compositionally these pictures are also reminiscent of some of his 1900 photographs of the city: in Outward Bound, The Mauretania or The City of Ambition (See: Lot 4) Stieglitz included objects, in the foreground, cropped by the bottom of the picture frame, whose shapes are repeated in the middle and background. She adds: And in their compression of space, their simplified geometric forms, and the resulting tension between two-dimensional surface and three-dimensional objects, these 1915-1916 photographs taken from 291 clearly reflect Stieglitz's understanding of cubism (Alfred Stieglitz, pp. 20-21).
Other prints of this image are in the "key set" of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. and in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.