Art & Antiques, December 1995

Fire In the Lake

At first glimpse, Lake George's narrow width could be mistaken for a long rambling river. It's not until you veer downhill from the honky-tonk shops and hotels of Route 9N to the docks below that you appreciate the grandeur of this cerulean body of water. Step foot into a sailboat, like my family has done weekly for the past 35 summers, and the narrow passage becomes an immense lake dotted with pine-studded islands and shadowed on either side by the verdant hills of the southern Adirondacks. For obvious sentimental reasons, it has become my yardstick to gauge all other travels.

The cool waters and green hills that serve as solace and repose for me have been a source of inspiration to many artists over the years including the early American Luminists of the 1850s, sculptor David Smith, and most notably, Alfred Stieglitz. Perhaps, no one is more associated with the pines and poplars of Lake George than this photographer and progenitor of modern American art. The Museum of Modern Art in New York is currently presenting "Stieglitz at Lake George" through January 2. More than half of the 93 photographs on display, ranging from the years 1914 to 1936, have never been shown to the public before.

The shores of Lake George, near the village of the same name, were vastly different over a century ago. When ten-year old Alfred Stieglitz first vacationed here in 1874 with his family, the foothills of the Adirondacks were a summer retreat for the affluent, not incomparable to other wealthy enclaves like Newport and Bar Harbor. Sprawling houses, so-called "camps" or "cottages," sloped down the manicured grounds to the waterfront. Alfred's father, Edward, rented accommodations until 1886, when he purchased Oaklawn, a three-story Victorian clapboard house that rested on the western banks of the lake. The veranda of the house overlooked five acres of meadows on the water's edge. Several years later, Edward purchased a farmhouse across the street to dispose of a group of pigs whose offensive smell was seeping through the wooden panels of Oaklawn.

Alfred Stieglitz would return to Oaklawn every summer, but it wasn't until 1915 that these surroundings seemed to have an impact on his work. In the previous decade, Stieglitz had grown tired with his photography, opting to leave the Photo-Secessionist movement to publish the highly acclaimed journal, Camera Work, and open a gallery called 291. Stieglitz's impressive eye for art extended beyond his own photography to the works of other artists. 291 was one of the first galleries to exhibit Matisse, Rodin, and Picasso in America. Even more important, Stieglitz encouraged and promoted a group of unknown artists who were at the forefront of the American modernist movement - John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, and Max Weber. However, it was the work of one Stieglitz protege in particular, Paul Strand, that had the greatest influence on his own art.

"The cubist-influenced works that Strand showed Stieglitz in 1915 were more advanced than anything Stieglitz had done," says John Szarkowski, Director of Photography at the MOMA and curator of the exhibit. "From this point onward, we see Stieglitz take a kind of pleasure in the process of photography that is different from his prior years." This is evident in the four photographs of Ellen Koeniger (1916) displayed in the exhibition. We see a dripping wet woman climbing onto the dock from the lake in a relaxed and carefree manner not usually associated with Stieglitz's earlier work.

Strand's photographs might have woken Stieglitz from his creative slumber, but it was the romance with Georgia O'Keeffe that passionately drove Stieglitz into a picture-taking frenzy. O'Keeffe's art was introduced to Stieglitz on his fifty-second birthday, January 1, 1916. By the summer of 1918, they were involved in one of the most sensual and artistically symbiotic relationships in the modern era. For the next 16 years, she would spend a good portion of her summer in Lake George with the man she would eventually marry in 1924. O'Keeffe's sexually evocative flowers and leaves filled her canvases while every inch of her body filled the lens of Stieglitz' camera. Stieglitz took more than 300 photographs of O'Keeffe - her famous hands twisting and twining, her forthright face, her lean and graceful nude body clearly focused in a bluntly erotic fashion. These pictures, which he thought of as a single portrait, are more than mere photographs of his wife. They represent Woman as only an impassioned artist could depict his Muse.

Inspired by O'Keeffe's love of nature, Stieglitz saw the resplendent beauty of Lake George with a new and more powerful vision. "Lake George is in my blood," he wrote John Marin, "the trees and lake and hills and sky, and here I am hardly back more than a few hours, and Lake George seems a dream and yet I know it is part of me." He would continue to photograph only the people and places he knew intimately - Georgia, his family, friends, staff, the grounds of Oaklawn and the House on the Hill (the farmhouse across the street that the Stieglitz family moved into after selling Oaklawn). However, he no longer felt the need to influence every aspect of his photography.

In 1921, Stieglitz began making images of clouds over Lake George, partly to prove to himself that he could take powerful photographs of a subject he could not control. He called these pictures of the sky, Equivalents; "equivalents of my most profound life experience, my basic philosophy of life" he wrote. These stormy cloud formations, which have forced my father on many occasion to furl up his sail and motor back to the dock, are abstracted images that capture an ethereal quality not often found in landscape photography at this time.

"I wanted a series of photographs which when seen by Ernst Bloch (the great composer) he would exclaim: Music! Music! Man, why that is music!" Stieglitz wrote.

In his late 60s, Stieglitz started to photograph the oaks and poplars that stood near the House on the Hill. He related the short life span of these trees to his own impending mortality. Stieglitz would write to Arthur Dove, "For forty years I have watched some trees there (Lake George) and in watching them I have learned about myself. One dying oak tree in especial I have watched. Last summer there were only three leaves on the dying oak tree and those leaves were already marked by the hand of death. I wonder sometimes if I am not like the dying oak tree with the three leaves, and if there will be any leaves at all next year."

Georgia O'Keeffe, now ensconced in New Mexico, returned to Lake George for the last time in 1946 to spread Stieglitz's ashes at the foot of a pine tree on the shores of the lake. Today, those ashes lie on the grounds of the Tahoe Motel. Next door, Oaklawn is now The Quarters of the Four Seasons Inn. Across the street, up Hill Drive, the red roof that stood atop the House on the Hill covers the Texas Motel. Yet, if you stare down at the lake, you'll notice that the view still looks remarkably similar to several of the photographs seen in MOMA's exhibition.

Stieglitz's friend, the author Jean Toomer, wrote in a eulogy, "Always I feel he is rooted in himself and to the spirit of the place. Not rooted to things; rooted to spirit. Not rooted to earth; rooted to air." Alfred Stieglitz is certainly rooted to the spirit of Lake George.