25 June - 15 September
"You press the button and we´ ll do the rest". George Eastman´ s famous phrase when he presented his first Kodak camera in public has always been a symbol of that moment when photography took its first steps. It was against this background of trial and error with the new technique that Edward Steichen (1879-1973) turned himself into the artist who chose to take photographs.
Steichen is one of the great photographers of the 20th century, an innovator whose biography takes us through some of the most important stages in the history of American photography. An immigrant, born in Luxembourg, Steichen was interested in this new ´ art´ or technique from an early age and his earliest work was related to pictorialism and symbolism, both in fashion at the end of the 19th century, where he made important innovations in photogravure technique.
In 1902 he began his collaboration with one of the most important figures in American photography, the critic and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, and with him he founded Photo-Secession, an essential reference in photography at the beginning of last century. He also collaborated in the influential review Camera Work. Later they opened the 291 gallery in New York, where the works of Picasso, Matisse or Brancusi were shown for the first time in America. Last but not least, there was his important work as the Curator of the Photography Department in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
1923 is a year to remember in Steichen´ s biography. He was appointed Head of photography for some of the Condé Nast publications, and he abandoned artistic photography, or art for art´ s sake, to focus on commercial photography, which was to make him famous, and to which he devoted his life to for the next 15 years, in spite of criticism from his former colleagues. From then on, Steichen was the photographer of the stars and of the world of luxury and glamour. He was the man who transposed the creations of the most famous fashion designers of the time onto the covers of Vogue and Vanity Fair. This is the author and these are the works on show in this exhibition : the man who worked in the world of haute couture. Between 1923 and 1938, the personalities of the time were shown through his lens : Coco Chanel, Fred Astaire, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo... Steichen is the master of haute couture portraits, where his artistic background, his creativity and his mastery of the art of composition all come into play.
What we find here are works which in some way show a desire to escape, a search for glamour, to forget some aspects of reality and the everyday world, something so common in that period between the wars. Steichen creates a style which was to end like an imaginary swan song with the outbreak of World War II.
This exhibition, organized jointly by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis, and the Musée de l´ Elysée, Lausanne, is important both because it is the first important exhibition of this artist´ s work shown in Europe since his death in 1973 and also because it will be the first time some of these photos, part of the important Condé Nast Archives, have been displayed in public. Here we have one of the treasures of the history of photography, which the Ministry of Culture has the good fortune to host and which we will all have the opportunity to admire in the Museo del Traje.
