Edward Steichen (1879-1973) 'White Lotus'

Edward Steichen (1879-1973)
'White Lotus', 1939
Dye-transfer Kodak 'Wash-Off Relief' print, printed 1940 by Noel Deeks, the photographer's darkroom printer; titled, dated, and variously annotated in pencil, and the photographer's 'Photograph by Edward Steichen' stamp on the reverse, framed.
6 7/8 x 9 5/8 in. (17.5 x 24.5 cm.)
sheet 6 7/8 x 10 in. (17.5 x 25.4 cm.)
Provenance
Christie's East, New York, 6 November 1984
Private Collection
Swann Galleries, 25 February 2020, Sale 2531, Lot 36
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Note
Pioneering photographer Edward Steichen, recognized as a groundbreaking painter, curator, scholar, and museum director, was also an avid horticulturist. In 1939 he took the present image in the gardens located on his 400-acre Umpawaug Farm in Redding, Connecticut, which boasted 10 acres dedicated to the photographer's Delphinium plants alone. Such was his love for this particular type of flower that The Museum of Modern Art in New York (where Steichen would later go on to serve as Director of the Photography Department after World War II) displayed them in 1936 when it mounted its first and only dedicated exhibition of flowers, titled Edward Steichen's Delphiniums.

Throughout his life, Steichen continually explored the intersection between art and flora. This long-standing passion is evident early in his career in images such as Heavy Roses, Voulangis, France, taken in 1914. He first photographed the lotus flower as early as 1915, when he made a series of dramatic images of the lotus plants in the garden of Eugene and Agnes Meyer's home in Mount Kisco, New York. This imagery proved so popular that one of Steichen's black-and-white lotus photographs was selected to represent his work in a series of 'Photography Postage Stamps' issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 2002.

Though the dye-transfer wash-off relief process was relatively new to Steichen's practice during the 1930s, his interest in working with color is chronicled in the printing process he employed to make his most iconic image, The Flatiron Building, New York, 1904, for which he used a combination gum bichromate technique, utilizing layers of pigmented dyes that allowed him to render a painterly, richly colored image.

The present photograph was printed by Noel Deeks, Steichen's printer for several projects between 1917 and 1942. Dye-transfer prints by Steichen are exceedingly rare to market. A dye-transfer print of another lotus sold at Sotheby's New York in 1998. A dye-transfer print of a variant image taken in the same photographic session as the present work, also printed by Deeks, was included in the 1961 exhibition Steichen the Photographer at The Museum of Modern Art. Dye-imbibition prints of a pink lotus from the same period reside in the collections of the Musée National d'Histoire et d'Art, Luxembourg (inv. 1985-030/142) and the George Eastman House, Rochester.