From the Back-Window "291"
1915
Medium
Platinum print
Dimensions
24.5 × 19.4 cm (image) 25.2 × 20.2 cm (paper)
Classification
platinum print
Department
Photography and Media
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Accession Number
66321
Rights
Public Domain
About this artwork
Stieglitz took this photograph from the back window of the gallery 291, possibly inspired by the fractured, geometric canvases of the Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the focus of an exhibition there just months earlier. Yet at the same time that Stieglitz was exploring modern art, he was also looking back to the 19th-century photographs of David Octavius Hill. He wrote to R. Child Bayley around that time, “I have done quite some photography recently. It is intensely direct. Por...
About the Artist
Alfred Stieglitz · 1864–1946
Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was a pioneering American photographer, art dealer, publisher, and advocate for the Modernist movement who was instrumental over his 50-year career in making photography an accepted art form. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, to German Jewish immigrant parents, Stieglitz spent his formative years studying mechanical engineering in Berlin, where he discovered photography in ...