An examination of the great photographer's role in and impact on the American avant-garde from 1900 to 1917 details the achievements of and the interrelationships among Stieglitz's photographer and painter associates

A close reading of photography yieldls a grounndbreaking cultural biography; reveals photography's impresario, Alfred Stieglitz, as he has never been revealed before and looks at his photographs as they have never been looked at before. In An American Lens, Jay Bochner looks at a series of milestones in the development of the American avant-garde that capture a pivotal period in artistic consciousness. He focuses on the multiple roles of Alfred Stieglitz--as influential gallery owner, photographer, and impresario of the emerging art scene--at a series of significant moments in his career. These close-ups offer a more intense and expanded understanding of the subject than the familiar long view. Bochner uses these scenes to recreate for today's readers the birth of modernism in America--what it was like to be an audience for the art of the early avant-garde. Moving from frame to frame, he shows us, for example, a single photograph by Stieglitz of a snowy night in 1893 and a short description by Stephen Crane of just such a snowfall; the preparation, the reception, and the aftermath of the famous Armory Show of modern art in 1913; Gertrude Stein's portraits in prose; New York at the dawn of Dada, with Paul Strand, Francis Picabia, and others; and the intersecting paths of Mina Loy, William Carlos Williams, and Marcel Duchamp in 1917. Bochner also examines Stieglitz's three great photographic series: his photographs of Georgia O'Keeffe, of clouds, and of skyscrapers. These sections of the book include many Stieglitz photos, including some rarely seen portraits of O'Keeffe. Stieglitz as impresario and artist achieved an almost mythical status, which some recent critics have worked to deflate--casting him, for example, as Svengali to Georgia O'Keeffe's spellbound Trilby. Engaging in neither idolatry nor demolition, Bochner looks instead for the truth about the man and the myth. The scenes from American art in An American Lens create a new version of Stieglitz's biography, allowing us to reread his life and the life of his times by focusing intently on what is visible and not so visible in the art he left behind.

When Duchamp moved from Paris to New York in 1915, he was disappointed by the predominantly nature-based abstraction he observed, publicly proclaiming that American artists were too dependent on outmoded European traditions and had overlooked their greatest subjects--the skyscraper and the machine. Meanwhile, the artists associated with Alfred Stieglitz and his "291" gallery remained loyal to their belief in nature as a source of ongoing renewal for visual culture, and emphasized the crucial role that intuition and spirituality played in their creation of art. The crossfire between Duchamp and Stieglitz and their respective circles defined a critical moment in early twentieth-century American art. Debating Modernism includes reproductions of work by artists from both camps, from Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand to Man Ray, Francis Picabia, and Marsden Hartley. An essay by curator Debra Bricker Balken traces the threads of the debate through the 1910s and 20s, and also addresses the appearance of sexualized imagery in nearly all of these artists' works, a phenomenon that ironically unifies the two seemingly opposed camps. Jay Bochner's essay focuses on the artists' respective violations of American expectations about art.

A close reading of photography yields a groundbreaking cultural biography; reveals photography's impresario, Alfred Stieglitz, as he has never been revealed before and looks at his photographs as they have never been looked at before.

His glory in Germany turns solemn with the onset of World War I and the death in combat of his close friend, a German officer named Karl von Freyburg - a loss vividly depicted in Hartley's renowned war motif paintings.".

Art, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows indeed, and the development of an avant-garde in the U.S. depended as much on socializing as on aesthetics. This lively social history recounts the adventures and amours of America's first practitioners of the modern arts. Diagrams of the convoluted relationships, a chronology, a cast of characters, and much more shed additional light on an immensely appealing period. 220 illustrations, 20 in color.