Nude with Lilacs
Nude with Lilacs, 1936
Edward Steichen (Luxembourgian / American, 1879 – 1973)
#1991.0014.0013
Renowned as the first modern fashion photographer, Edward J. Steichen achieved success as a photographer, curator and tastemaker. In 1905 Steichen and Alfred Stieglitz partnered to open 291, the most influential modern art gallery in America. Steichen’s photographs were regularly published in Stieglitz’s quarterly magazine Camera Works, which championed photography as an art form. Steichen worked as a military photographer during World War II. He directed the documentary The Fighting Lady, winning the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Between 1947 and 1962 Steichen was director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where he curated many groundbreaking shows.
Steichen also introduced the artistic nude into the world of modern print advertising. Hired by a soap company in the 1930s to give their scintillating ads the legitimacy of fine art, Steichen’s female nudes often hint at canonical figures within the history of art. Telling of the era, models would rarely agree for their faces to be visible in nude photographs, and Steichen thought of ingenious ways to work around this problem. In Nude With Lilacs, the female model hedonistically inhales the lilacs in her hands, cleverly obscuring her face with the petals, while allowing the viewer full visual access to her toned and posed figure.
