From the Back-Window "291"

Stieglitz took this photograph from the back window of the gallery 291, possibly inspired by the fractured, geometric canvases of the Cubist painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, the focus of an exhibition there just months earlier. Yet at the same time that Stieglitz was exploring modern art, he was also looking back to the 19th-century photographs of David Octavius Hill. He wrote to R. Child Bayley around that time, “I have done quite some photography recently. It is intensely direct. Portraits. Buildings from my back window at 291, a whole series of them, a few landscapes and interiors. All interrelated. I know nothing outside of Hill’s work which I think is so direct, and quite so intensely honest.” For more on the Alfred Stieglitz collection at the Art Institute, along with in-depth object information, please visit the website: The Alfred Stieglitz Collection.