Edward Steichen photogravure of Auguste Rodin Added to an Already Exceptional Arts and Crafts Collection
December 2, 2013
Photogravure of Auguste Rodin by Edward Steichen
The Two Red Roses Foundation is proud to announce the latest addition to our collection of photogravures and photographic prints. The acquisition of this powerful portrait of sculptor Auguste Rodin by Edward Steichen is a welcome addition to our holdings of over 200 photogravures as well as platinum, palladium, gum bichromate, bromoil, and silver gelatin prints.The collection focuses on works from major American and European pictorialists from 1880-1930, in addition to photographers who were part of the Photo-Secession movement from the early 20th century, and whose work was regularly published in periodicals like Camera Notes and Camera Work, both edited by Alfred Stieglitz. Some of the artists included in the collection are Peter Henry Emerson, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Käsabier, Clarence H. White, Emile Constant Puyo, Heinrich Kuhn, Robert Demachy, George H. Seeley, Arthur Wesley Dow, Edward Steichen, and Alfred Stieglitz. This wonderful gum-bichromate print will be displayed, along with many other images, in a Photography Gallery in the Museum of the American Arts & Crafts Movement, soon to be built in St. Petersburg, Florida.
Press Release from Doyle's Auction Gallery in New York City:
Edward Steichen's Portrait of Auguste Rodin Achieves an Auction Record at Doyle New York's November 25, 2013 Photographs Auction
Doyle New York held a successful auction of Photographs on Monday, November 25, 2013. The sale featured 240 lots of iconic images by some of the most renowned names in the history of photography, spanning the early period of the medium up to the present day. Highlighting the sale was a gum bichromate print of Edward Steichen's powerful portrait of Auguste Rodin. Estimated at $20,000-30,000, the photograph was the subject of intense international competition that sent the price to a stunning $185,000, a world auction record for the image. The print measures 15 7/8 x 11 7/8 including black borders, is signed by Steichen recto in pencil (l.l.) and dated in his hand MCMVII (1907), dry-mounted to a gray card with a small exhibit ink stamp on verso with the penciled notation "Buffalo Fine Arts Acad." written across. The print comes from the collection of Steichen's patron, Agnes Ernst Meyer and is probably the example exhibited at the 1910 International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography curated by Alfred Stieglitz at the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, NY., from November 3 to December 1 1910. The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy's Albright Art Gallery (now the Albright-Knox Art Gallery) was the setting for the International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography, the first major show of the photography of the Photo-Secession. It was curated by Alfred Stieglitz. It was this exhibition that established not only the legitimacy of the Photo-Secession movement, but (in the United States, at least) that of photography as a creative medium. Stieglitz felt it was an ambition fulfilled, and wrote "The dream I had in 1885 in Berlin has been realized--the full recognition of photography by an important art museum." It seems likely from the stamped and penciled notations mentioned above that this is the example that was hung in that exhibit, as item 401, one of thirty-one images by Steichen in the show.