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WINGS December extraordinary gift for perceiving talent in various arts wherever it showed itself and an equal gift for encouraging those artists who deserved it. In a sense he has been both a critic and a patron. But he has been so much more than this that those terms as ordinarily applied fail to characterize his accomplishment. What has actually happened during the generation of his effective leadership is that artists of like mind have come together for sympathy and interchange of ideas and have found in him a kind of natural clearing-house as well as an advisor and a supporter. He has been one of the first to see merit as it rose and one of the first to make new merits familiar to the world. America and Alfred Stieglitz is a collective portrait of Alfred Stieglitz in his relations to the society in which he has lived. It begins with a study by William Carlos Williams of the whole American background, particularly of the Pioneer-Puritan culture from which the principal creative work of the United States has come. It goes on with an account by Lewis Mumford of the metropolitan background of New York in which Alfred Stieglitz established himself. Then follows a biographical interpretation by Paul Rosenfeld who introduces Stieglitz the individual after the stage of the whole background has already been set. Two subsequent chapters give an account of his own medium of photography and of the actual workshops in which his career had expressed itself. These first five chapters, Part I, are personal and social. Part II, the next four chapters, may be called critical. They study the movements of art in the Stieglitz period, both in America and in Europe, and point out the connections between these movements and the contemporary movements in science and philosophy in their efforts to give form and expression to the new civilization which is obviously replacing the old. In Part III are given a group of briefer sketches by more than a dozen contemporaries who have had a part in Stieglitz's life and in whose lives Stieglitz has had a part. Although the book is written by several contributors it is so strongly marked by the essential personality of Stieglitz that it is surprisingly unified in tone and significance. It is a book of striking interest and lasting value. Its one hundred and twenty illustrations furnish a brilliant gallery of modern American art. Individual copies of the trade edition of America and Alfred Stieglitz may be purchased at any bookstore. The retail price is $3.50. 1934 WINGS ALFRED STIEGLITZ · Dorothy Norman ALFRED STIEGLITZ is seventy. For nearly fifty years he has been in the public eye, as photographer, as patron and pioneer in the arts, as a great and inspired teacher, as one of the most generous and lovable and at the same time one of the most uncompromising of men. Scattered in periodicals all over the world, during the past fifty years there have appeared innumerable articles, reports and criticisms of this unique man and his manifold activities. What is he? Who is he? In America, among the first to recognize his importance and to write enthusiastically about him was the young reporter Theodore Dreiser, as early as 1899; James Huneker, Rupert Hughes ... As the scope of his activities grew, the number of articles written, not only by leading artists and [[image]] Permission of An American Place A photograph by Alfred Stieglitz EXHIBITION AT "291"——1914 7
