Made in America: Radical Figures

This exhibition is no longer on view at the National Gallery.

Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in New York City (1905–1917) was not much bigger than this installation’s room, but it sparked great debates about modern art. Pioneering exhibitions of work by such Europeans as Constantin Brancusi, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and Auguste Rodin challenged Americans like Georgia O’Keeffe and Max Weber to reconceive the body in more expressive and abstract ways. In his photographs, Stieglitz explored how body parts—neck, torso, hands, legs, even feet—could convey the whole.

The art of the portrait was also rethought by the artists of 291, who played with words and symbols to express identity. Francis Picabia depicted Stieglitz as a broken machine—part camera, part car—with its limp bellows unable to reach the lens at the top. Marius de Zayas collaborated with Agnes E. Meyer, an art patron and journalist, to construct a fractured poem-portrait of a woman’s feelings about an illicit romance. Using colored triangles, Edward Steichen lampooned Marsden Hartley as Mushton Shlushley, the Lyric Poet and Aestheticurean (a fusion of “aesthete” and “epicurean”), and he depicted fellow painter John Marin as Johnny Marine, a beady-eyed peeping Tom.

O’Keeffe hesitated to show some of her paintings because she regarded them as intimate portraits, yet few viewers realized it: “They have slipped into the world as abstractions—no one seeing what they are.” Her 1946 painting A Black Bird with Snow-Covered Red Hills, with its mustachelike bird, may be a portrait of Stieglitz, who had a bushy mustache and referred to himself as Old Crow’s Feathers. If that is true, the painting can be read as O’Keeffe’s farewell to her husband, who had just died.    

About this Series
American Art, 1900–1950: Prints, Drawings, and Photographs

During a period fueled by enormous urban growth and technological changes, riven by world wars, and rocked by new modes of thought, American artists explored many diverse means to express their changing experience and environment. Prints, drawings, and photographs were vital media through which artists pursued radical experiments in form, figuration, and abstraction. Reevaluating European traditions, they developed new ways of seeing the modern world around them.
 
Complementing the American modernist paintings and sculptures in the adjacent galleries, these rotating installations feature prints, drawings, and photographs by American artists working in the first half of the 20th century. By looking at pairs or groups of artists, or at broader themes such as abstract portraiture or the Machine Age, the installations spark conversations between established and lesser-known figures in American modernism and highlight the era’s full range and complexity.

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Made in America: Radical Figures

Constantin Brâncuși, Woman's Head, c. 1910, conté crayon with blind stylus on wove paper, Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund, 1971.66.2

Made in America: Radical Figures

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe, 1918, palladium print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1980.70.8

Made in America: Radical Figures

Marius de Zayas, Agnes Ernst Meyer, Mental Reactions, 1915, brush and pen and black ink with collage of cut-and-pasted texts over graphite on paperboard, Gift of Helen Porter and James T. Dyke, 2007.37.1

Made in America: Radical Figures

Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothy True, 1919, gelatin silver print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.3.438

Made in America: Radical Figures

Henri Matisse, Seated Nude, Light Version (Petit Bois clair), 1906, woodcut in black on laid paper, Rosenwald Collection, 1964.8.1255

Made in America: Radical Figures

Alfred Stieglitz, Claudia O'Keeffe, 1922, gelatin silver print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.3.519

Made in America: Radical Figures

Henri Matisse, Nude in Three-Quarters with Part of Her Head Cropped Off (Nu de trois-quarts, une partie de la tête coupée), 1913, lithograph in black on Japanese vellum, Andrew W. Mellon Fund, 1977.42.1

Made in America: Radical Figures

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe—Torso, 1918, palladium print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1980.70.38

Made in America: Radical Figures

Master F.P., Woman Carrying a Tray, 1527/1530, etching, Andrew W. Mellon Fund, 1977.46.1

Made in America: Radical Figures

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe—Torso, 1918/1919, palladium print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1980.70.30

Made in America: Radical Figures

Auguste Rodin, Rear View of Female Figure in Action, 1904, watercolor over graphite on wove paper, Gift of Mrs. John W. Simpson, 1942.5.35

Made in America: Radical Figures

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe—Torso, 1918, palladium print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1980.70.37

Made in America: Radical Figures

Edward Steichen, Mushton Shlushley, the Lyric Poet and Aestheticurean, c. 1922, opaque watercolor and ink over graphite on paperboard, Gift of Joanna T. Steichen, 2011.85.1

Made in America: Radical Figures

Alfred Stieglitz, Helen Freeman, 1921, palladium print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949.3.461

Made in America: Radical Figures

Edward Steichen, Madame X and Johnny Marine, c. 1922, opaque watercolor and ink over graphite on paperboard, Gift of Joanna T. Steichen, 2011.85.3

Made in America: Radical Figures

Max Weber, Crouching Nude, 1919-1920, color woodcut on wove paper, Gift of Daryl and Lee Rubenstein, 1976.60.1

Made in America: Radical Figures

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe—Neck, 1921, palladium print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1980.70.160

Made in America: Radical Figures

Max Weber, Standing Nude, 1919-1920, color woodcut on wove paper, Gift of Jack and Margrit Vanderryn, 2015.114.4

Made in America: Radical Figures

Alfred Stieglitz, Georgia O'Keeffe with Matisse Sculpture, 1921, palladium print, Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1980.70.176

Made in America: Radical Figures

Francis Picabia, Machine tournez vite (Machine Turn Quickly), 1916/1918, brush and ink with watercolor and shell gold over a 19th-century French lithographic illustration; laid down on canvas, Patrons' Permanent Fund, 1989.10.1

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Organization: Organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington.