Missionary of the New

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Thus every time he embraced an artist's work and showed it in his minuscule gallery, it was to some extent a missionary act, a declaration of faith, not a mere display of the latest thing in stock. "You know that there are very few artists in this country whose work means anything to me," he wrote to Dove in 1922. "It is all too stillborn. Yours, and Marin's, and Georgia's are never like that." And though Dove was plagued with difficulties--shortages of money and self-confidence, family crises, interruptions of every kind--Stieglitz never wavered in his loyalty to the man who would come to paint such masterpieces of American abstraction as That Red One, 1944. No wonder that Stieglitz became Dove's surrogate father--or that Dove once listed the men who mattered most to him as "Christ, Einstein and Stieglitz."

Likewise, Stieglitz's lifelong bond with Marin was based on an intense mutual respect, although Marin was capable of putting it to unusual tests. Once, having extracted an advance of $1,200 from his buddy and benefactor to keep himself and his new wife going for a year, the great landscapist turned up after six weeks and told Stieglitz that he had blown every cent of it buying a waterless island in Maine, and that his wife was expecting. The chosen few who got to show at Stieglitz's galleries were not members of a stable but rather part foster children and part co-explorers. "Remember my fight for O'Keeffe and Marin is my fight for you as well," he wrote to the frail and self-doubting Demuth. "We're all in one boat unsinkable."

What seems amazing, looking back on it, is how early, and how accurately, Stieglitz picked those works of art that lie at the core of each artist's achievement. Thus he supported for years the deeply depressive and conflicted Hartley, both morally and to some extent financially. And when you see the magnificent range of some 20 Hartleys in this show, you realize that the essence of the man is there: not only the profoundly felt abstractions of military uniforms and insignia like Portrait of a German Officer, 1914, done in mourning for his young German lover killed in the trenches, but also the New Mexico paintings, the Maine seascapes and the plangent, unnerving grief of Eight Bells Folly: Memorial for Hart Crane, 1933.

The eye didn't just go for his contemporaries. Stieglitz was the first American to show "primitive" art in an "advanced" gallery--this being in the fall of 1914. Anthropological museums showed jumbles and heaps of African artifacts, but Stieglitz--whose eyes had been opened to such things in Paris by Picasso, Matisse and others--was ready and willing to assign an inscrutable Ivory Coast mask the dignity and singularity of an old Florentine bronze, or a new Brancusi. Today critics might find some unconscious bias in his belief that African art was close to the art of children: instinctive, untutored, vital. And because he thought much the same about art made by women, some feminist theorists might not like him much.

Yet in the end, the breadth of Stieglitz's mind, the energy of his passions and his unerring sense of radical beauty outweigh any quibbles. He was a hero, and one can only be grateful to the National Gallery for showing him at full scale and in such rich detail.