Book Description

This catalog brings together, for the first time, more than 70 artist portraits by Edward Steichen from the collection of the Musée national d'histoire et d'art Luxembourg. Edward Steichen (1879-1973) ranks as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century; he was also a painter, gallerist, and a museum curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His photographic oeuvre begins around 1890 with pictorialism-style atmospheric photographs, and reaches its peak with avant-garde fashion photography and glamorous celebrity portraits from the 1920s and 30s. As chief photographer for all Condé Nast magazines, which included Vanity Fair and Vogue, Steichen redefined fashion and portrait photography. He trained his camera on New York celebrities, Hollywood stars, stage and film actors, as well as artists and literati. His subjects included, among others, Auguste Rodin, Constantin Brancusi, Franz von Lenbach, Henri Matisse, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Thomas Mann, and Richard Strauss. The text is in English and German.