Let the image speak for itself

Let the Image Speak for Itself

Alfred Stieglitz impact on the poetry of William Carlos Williams

Alfred Stieglitz Born in Hoboken, NJ. 1864 Moved to Germany for school 1884 started interest in photography First article in 1887 about amature photography In

Germany - lead to more writing/more photos Moved to New York 1891 Formed The Camera Club of New York- merger of SAP and

NYCC 1897 Camera Notes 1902 Photo Secession- exhibition judged only by

Photographers put on by National Arts club- positive feedback

Lead to Camera work same year- journal of developing photography as an individual art form

Photography as an Art form Unlike painting –

photography is instantaneous

Must be a seer Clear sharp

representation- maximum detail with maximum simplification

Snap shots of New York (1901)

Old and New York 1901

Reflections of Night

1902

291 The Original Modern Art Gallery

Gallery 291 (1908)- goal was to showcase different mediums side by side

Rodin, Matisse Rousseau, Cezanne, Picasso (European)

Minerva date unknown

Tiger in a Tropical Storm

1891

Girl with a Mandolin

1910

Alfred Maurer, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Max Weber (American)

Painting No. 48, 1913

Brooklyn Bridge 1912

Cow 1914

Interior Fourth Dimension 1914

Armory show (1913) VP, first official exhibition

of modern art in America Most famous and

polarizing: Matisse’s “Blue Nude (Souvenir de Biskra)” and “Madras Rouge (Red Madras Headdress),”and Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2”

Impressionist Fauvist and Cubism were represented

Williams Evolution of Style Began with Keatsian

and Whitmanian form and content

Pound in London 1909-1910

Exclamatory then Imagism

The Tempers (1913) Poundonian style

Fascination with visual arts on New York Avant Garde

Camera work

“The step Williams took consisted of a progression from the concept, the thought, to the poem itself, just as the painters following Cezanne began to talk of the sheer paint: a picture a matter of pigments upon a piece of cloth stretched on a frame” (Dijkstra 50).

Marcel Duchamp (Bride 1912)

Image as a Subject vs. Metaphor Visual space/ tension

into Poetry Remove narrative

sequence of imagist poems - Story

Moment of Perception

“Dawn”

Ecstatic bird songs pound the hollow vastness of the sky with metallic clinkings-- beating color up into it at a far edge,--beating it, beating it with rising, triumphant ardor,-- stirring it into warmth, quickening in it a spreading change,-- bursting wildly against it as dividing the horizon, a heavy sun lifts himself--is lifted-- bit by bit above the edge of things,--runs free at last out into the open--!lumbering glorified in full release upward-- songs cease. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-Bi8fwakMo

Francis Picabia , Nu devant un

paysage

Good Art vs. Bad Art- Williams Lens The story cannot

overtake the visual content

If used must sacrifice the immediacy and objective perception of a painting

Instead suggests artist should isolate moment of reality and strip it from all things nonessential

Recreating the pure moment

Example; “Station in a metro Ezra Pound” (1919) The apparition of these faces in the crowd;. Petals on a wet, black bough.

Example Williams “Red Wheelbarrow” So much depends upon the red wheelbarrow

Creative Imagination- Memory Photos Imagination as- “The

undetermined moments between waking and sleeping” (53).

These moments create a lasting mental photo reel that refuses the limits of time and shape.

Certain aspects of the original action “become liquid.” Creating new form

=

Two Figures (1913-14), Liubov' Popova

“Nothing is Good Save the New.”

“Danse Russe” (1917)

If I when my wife is sleeping and the baby and Kathleen are sleeping and the sun is a flame-white disc in silken mists above shining trees,-- if I in my north room dance naked, grotesquely before my mirror waving my shirt round my head and singing softly to myself: "I am lonely, lonely. I was born to be lonely, I am best so!" If I admire my arms, my face, my shoulders, flanks, buttocks again the yellow drawn shades,--

Who shall say I am not the happy genius of my household?

Girl with a Mirror- Henrich Kuehn

1906

Alice Boughton 1909

“Queen-Ann’s-Lace” (1921)Her body is not so white asanemony petals nor so smooth—norso remote a thing. It is a fieldof the wild carrot takingthe field by force; the grassdoes not raise above it.Here is no question of whiteness,white as can be, with a purple moleat the center of each flower.Each flower is a hand’s spanof her whiteness. Whereverhis hand has lain there isa tiny purple blemish. Each partis a blossom under his touchto which the fibres of her beingstem one by one, each to its end,until the whole field is awhite desire, empty, a single stem,a cluster, flower by flower,a pious wish to whiteness gone over—or nothing.

Nude against the light Constant Puyo 1906

Alice Boughton The Seasons

1909

Ignored Relationship Letters in 1922 (Yale

Stieglitz file), Marsden Hartley’s Adventures in the Arts,

John Marin Painting Cover up in Williams

Autobiography