Le Tournesol (The Sunflower), c. 1920

During the first half of his career, Edward Steichen was the leading exemplar of the painter/photographer in the group of artists who gathered around Alfred Stieglitz in New York. Steichen’s early tonalist paintings correspond with the evocative pictorialist style of his photographs. Devoting himself to both disciplines, Steichen promoted photography as a fine art equal to painting at a time when photography’s status as an art form was still questioned by many.

After pioneering the use of aerial photography for the army during World War I, Steichen suffered bouts of depression, endured a bitter divorce, and faced serious financial challenges. Seeking solace, he returned intermittently to his beloved house and garden in Voulangis, France. In 1923 Steichen burned his backlog of paintings there in a bonfire and abandoned the medium to pursue a lucrative career in commercial photography with Condé Nast. In doing so, Steichen distanced himself from his mentor Stieglitz, who continued to explore the relationship between painting and photography and to disdain popular, commercial art.

While the numerous accounts of Steichen’s life during the 1920s provided by himself, by his great friend and brother-in-law the poet Carl Sandburg, and by many other scholars and commentators vary somewhat, the sequence of events surrounding the making of Le Tournesol is quite well documented.[1]  [1]
The most salient accounts are: Carl Sandburg, Steichen: The Photographer (New York, 1929), 36–45; Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York, 1963), n. p.; Anne Cohen DePietro, “The Paintings of Eduard Steichen,” in The Paintings of Eduard Steichen (Huntington, NY, 1985), 19, 39–42; Mary Ann Goley, “From Tonalism to Modernism: The Paintings of Eduard J. Steichen,” in The Paintings of Eduard J. Steichen: From Tonalism to Modernism (Cleveland, OH, 1988), 21–23; Patricia Johnston, Real Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography (Berkeley, CA, 1997), 22–24; Joanna Steichen, Steichen’s Legacy: Photographs, 1895–1973 (New York, 2000), xx, 265–267; Barbara Haskell, Edward Steichen (New York, 2000), 27–29; William A. Ewing and Todd Brandow, eds., Edward Steichen: In High Fashion: The Conde Nast Years, 1923–1937 (New York, 2008), 19–20; and Todd Brandow and William A. Ewing, Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography (Minneapolis, MN, 2008). The primary source for Steichen studies is the Steichen Archive at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. After his official discharge from the army on October 31, 1919, Steichen traveled to Paris, where he wrote to Stieglitz about the abysmal state of the contemporary art world there. By the spring of 1920, Steichen was ensconced in Voulangis and had set about putting the war behind him by energetically engaging in a number of interrelated activities. He tended his magnificent garden, cultivated, painted, and photographed sunflowers, and delved deeply into a variety of complex theories purporting to explain the universal rule of ratios and measurements known as the Golden Section or Golden Measure.

In the spring of 1921, Steichen’s idyll was interrupted when he was summoned back to the United States in response to a lawsuit filed by his estranged wife, Clara. Relying on money he had earned in New York from portrait commissions, Steichen was again living in Voulangis that fall. A year later, soon after his divorce had been finalized and just as Le Tournesol went on view from November 1 to December 17, 1922, at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, Steichen, burdened by alimony payments and other debts, embarked for New York in search of more stable sources of income. In March 1923, Condé Nast hired him as chief photographer for Vogue and Vanity Fair at the then extraordinary sum of $35,000 a year.

On assignment for Vogue in France in late 1923, Steichen made the fateful decision to destroy all his paintings in Voulangis. Back in New York, he soon slashed and threw out the paintings he had stored there as well. Fortunately, however, by that time Steichen had already given Le Tournesol to his friend, the noted artist and furniture and interior designer, Francis Jourdain. Executed in a startling, hard-edged modernist style, it is the only finished canvas of its kind to survive from this volatile period in Steichen’s personal and creative life.

Steichen recalled his time in Voulangis following the trauma of the war as “three of the most productive years of my life.”[2]  [2]
Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York, 1963), n. p. The variety and depth of the interests that animate Le Tournesol confirm this. Exploring the sunflowers he grew in his garden with his camera and with his brush, Steichen, with “deep, earnest soul-searching,” pursued “a feeling that, perhaps, in the field of art, there might be some way of making an affirmative contribution to life.”[3]  [3]
Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York, 1963), n. p. His goal was nothing less than understanding the relation of nature to art:

I set out to try to understand nature’s discipline. I decided to make a study of the ratio of plant growth and structure. . . . I found some form of the spiral in the most succulent plants and in certain flowers, particularly in the seed pods of the sunflower, of which I had made so many photographic studies. I decided there must be a relationship between all these things and what had been known for a long time as the Golden Section, or Golden Measure: the proportion of the extreme and mean ratio.[4]  [4]
Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography (New York, 1963), n. p.

Perhaps the most vivid expression of Steichen’s ambition to synthesize horticulture, photography, and painting is the circular burst of yellow in Le Tournesol that simultaneously evokes the sun, the sunflower, and flash photography.

In addition to Steichen’s many photographs of sunflowers, there are at least three works, all in the National Gallery of Art collection, that are directly related to Le Tournesol: a pencil sketch [fig. 1]   [fig. 1] Edward Steichen, Untitled (Preliminary Study for "Le Tournesol"), c. 1920, graphite on paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Francesca Calderone-Steichen, a tempera and oil study on canvas [fig. 2]   [fig. 2] Edward Steichen, Study for "Le Tournesol (The Sunflower)", c. 1920, tempera and oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Joanna T. Steichen, and a small tempera on paperboard [fig. 3]   [fig. 3] Edward Steichen, Rabbit (Le Tournesol), c. 1920, tempera, metallic paint, and graphite on paperboard, National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of Joanna T. Steichen.[5]  [5]
Among the series Sunflowers from Seed to Seed, executed by Steichen from 1920 to 1961, the work most directly related to Le Tournesol is Sunflower in a White Vase. The image is reproduced in Joanna Steichen, Steichen’s Legacy: Photographs, 1895–1973 (New York, 2000), pl. 304. The pencil sketch shows Steichen exploring the shifting contours and the expanding and contracting volumes suggested to him by the essentially female vase form. The tempera-and-oil study contains recognizable leaves—the only explicit plant imagery found in any of the sunflower works. These are in turn set against a backdrop of rectangular forms that overlap and cut across each other in ambiguous ways. In this case, Steichen appears to have intentionally represented the iconic, swelling form of the vase not by modeling it in tempera, but instead by leaving the relevant portion of the ground of the painting untouched, allowing negative space to take on positive form.[6]  [6]
Steichen’s intent is not entirely clear. He may also have been holding the ground in reserve to apply metallic leaf or a metallic paint of some kind, media he had used in other works. Finally, the small tempera on paperboard, Rabbit, shares the two long-ear forms that protrude from the top of the circle in Study for Le Tournesol. However, in this instance its rectangles are more rationally divided and symmetrically arranged in contrast to the curving, stylized shapes of the vase and sunflower. The scale and medium of Rabbit, as well as its metamorphic qualities, are further related to Steichen’s contemporary illustrations for an unrealized children’s book about an imaginary land inhabited by fanciful creatures called Oochens. Like Le Tournesol, the Oochens’ stark geometries were also inspired by the artist’s fascination with the Golden Section.[7]  [7]
The fifteen Oochens are all owned by the National Gallery of Art: Mushton Shlushley, the Lyric Poet and Aestheticurean, The Pup-Who-Sacrificed-a-Piece-of-His-Head-So-He'd-Have-a-Tail-to-Wag, Madame X and Johnny Marine, The Pink-Faced Politician, Khor, the President of the Oochen Republic, Thinkrates, the Philosopher, Khor, in His House on Top of the World, The Colossal Deep Sea Ludicrocerous, The Cinnamon Bun B'Ar Stalking the Dish of Fruit Bush, The Radio Gull, The Lugubrious Mysterious Midnight Hour Phantom Green Cheese Moon, The Peeping Gagaboo, The Pie-Faced Squilk and Her Pink-Nosed Neighbor, The-Duck, and The Golden Meadowlark.

Le Tournesol’s vibrant color, sharp lines, pristine forms, and carefully calibrated, dynamic design place Steichen among the vanguard of American artists, most notably Charles Sheeler (American, 1883 - 1965), Georgia O'Keeffe (American, 1887 - 1986), and Charles Demuth (American, 1883 - 1935), who practiced the modernist style of the 1920s that would come to be known as precisionism. Le Tournesol also reflects Steichen’s firsthand knowledge of contemporary developments in European art and the emphasis on machine aesthetics in the work of painters such as Fernand Léger (French, 1881 - 1955) and Francis Picabia (French, 1879 - 1953). Steichen was, moreover, personally and directly inspired by the sculptures of his close friend, the Romanian artist Constantin Brâncuși (Romanian, 1876 - 1957). Steichen had acquired and installed Brancusi’s magnificent bronze Maiastra [fig. 4]   [fig. 4] Constantin Brancusi, Maiastra, 1911, bronze on limestone base, Tate Gallery, London. Image: Tate, London / Art Resource, NY in his garden at Voulangis in 1913, the year before World War I erupted in Europe.[8]  [8]
On the Brancusi Maiastra installed at Voulangis, see Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art Other Than Works by British Artists (London, 1981), 71–73. Perhaps in an attempt to resurrect the brighter outlook of the prewar era, in Le Tournesol Steichen has skillfully translated the language of sculpture into the idiom of painting with the golden patina, glowing polished surface, and ovoid body of Brancusi’s bronze bird becoming the brilliant color, radiating light, and expanding shapes of Steichen’s painted vase and sunflower.

Le Tournesol presents art historians with the unusual and puzzling case of a prominent painter creating what is arguably his most original and significant achievement at the very moment that he decided to forego painting for photography. Because Steichen destroyed so many of his canvases and stopped painting soon after completing Le Tournesol, this remarkable work, instead of clearly initiating a new path in Steichen’s painting career, heralds its demise. Addressing this ambivalent ending, in 1929 Sandburg observed: “So now he could be surer of himself when saying, ‘I’m through with painting’—though he knew the Oochuns [sic] might be laughing at him.”[9]  [9]
Carl Sandburg, Steichen: The Photographer (New York, 1929), 45.

Charles Brock

September 29, 2016