“Oceans, Rivers & Skies: Anselm Adams,
Robert Adams & Alfred Stieglitz”
National Gallery of Art, Washington.
October 12, 2008-March 15, 2009.
Georgia O’Keeffe’s bequest to the National Gallery in 1949 of the Alfred Steiglitz “Key Set”—1,311 definitive, mounted prints by her late husband—was a symbolic gesture, not only for the newly opened museum but also for the newly accepted medium of fine-art photography. Although the gift sat idle for a few decades, it was the start of the museum’s archive, which now includes over 8,000 photographic images. More recently, work from the Key Set has been frequently and insightfully displayed by Sarah Greenough, the museum’s senior curator of photography, a noted Steiglitz scholar and, for years, the sole curator of fine-art photography at the National Gallery. Greenough’s current exhibition, “Oceans, Rivers, and Skies: Ansel Adams, Robert Adams, and Alfred Stieglitz,” is a testament to her mastery of both the subject and the history of the medium.
The show is composed of three series: all black-and-white landscapes, each from pivotal stages in these artists’ careers. These twenty-one images, spanning five decades, depict moments at which these artists grappled with abstraction. In the end, these three artists eschewed a narrative mode in ways that were emblematic of a schism in the philosophy of picturemaking, a divide that occurred at the end of pictorialism, as photographers moved away from the instinct to imitate the Old Masters.
Of the three, Steiglitz was the first to experiment with abstraction. He was