strongly that he needed to continue his work as a
supporter of American art at a new gallery, and
photographer Paul Strand and close friend Dor-
othy Norman raised funds to rent a space at 509
Madison Avenue that Stieglitz dubbed ‘‘An Amer-
ican Place.’’ The light-filled space included five
rooms, with white or pale grey walls, and a plain,
painted cement floor. The gallery opened on
December 7 with an exhibition of new watercolors
by John Marin.
At An American Place, Stieglitz maintained and
refined the same approach to exhibiting art that
had informed his work in the earlier spaces. He
disavowed any commercial practices including
advertising or promoting the gallery to potential
customers. The phone number was not listed in the
phonebook and one oft-repeated story involved a
woman asking Stieglitz where she might find the
gallery he ran, and the photographer responding
with a dismissive explanation that he did not run
any gallery—clearly he felt the confused woman to
be unworthy of the kind of intellectual and spiritual
sustenance offered by An American Place. Stieglitz
did not profit financially from his role at the gal-
lery. Funds from the sale of works of art went
directly to support the artists and to pay the rent.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Stieglitz focused his
attention on an increasingly small group of Amer-
ican artists, rather than the international artists
that he had championed from 1903–1917. The lim-
ited season of four to five shows annually at An
American Place featured regular exhibitions of new
work by painters John Marin, Arthur Dove, and
Georgia O’Keeffe; other artists supported at the
gallery included Charles Demuth, Paul Strand,
and Marsden Hartley. With the opening of the
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) just one month
earlier than An American Place, Stieglitz antici-
pated MoMA’s preference for the European avant
garde and sought to advocate on behalf of the
American artists he had supported since the earliest
years of their careers.
Only a handful of photographers had exhibitions
at An American Place, but their impact was never-
theless significant, and photography remained an
essential element of the American modernist aes-
thetic advanced by Stieglitz. Soon after Julien Levy
opened his new gallery in New York devoted to
Surrealist art and photography in the fall of 1931,
Stieglitz decided to mount a retrospective of his own
work.127 Photographs (1892–1932) by Alfred Stie-
glitzwas open from February 15 to March 5, 1932,
and featured early images of New York and portraits
of colleagues such as Marin and Paul Rosenfeld, as
well asEquivalents, portraits of Dorothy Norman,
portraits of O’Keeffe, and new views of the changing
skyline in midtown Manhattan as seen from the win-
dows of An American Place and his apartment at
the Shelton Hotel. Just one month later, Stieglitz
mounted his final exhibition of work by Paul Strand.
This show included images from Strand’s driftwood
series and views of the New Mexico and Colorado
landscape. Their friendship of more than fifteen
years, however, was strained and Strand saw less
and less relevance in the spiritual formalism advo-
cated by his mentor. After handing in his keys to the
gallery at the close of his exhibition, Strand would
spend the next decade involved with social-realist
and documentary filmmaking. Inspired by the re-
discovery of some of his old negatives from the
1880s and 1890s, Stieglitz mounted one final exhibi-
tion of his own work in December 1934, to coincide
with the publication of the collection of essays,Amer-
ica and Alfred Stieglitz.
On March 28, 1933, a new young photographer
walked into the gallery and presented his work to
Stieglitz. After looking through the portfolio, the
senior master welcomed Ansel Adams to An Amer-
ican Place. The two photographers maintained a
regular correspondence over the next decade, and
the West Coast-based photographer made annual
visits to New York to meet with Stieglitz. Stieglitz
harbored hopes that Adams might take on the
mantle of championing American art and photo-
graphy at An American Place, but the younger
artist would not abandon his connection to the
Western landscape. Stieglitz presented Adams’s
work in a solo show at An American Place in the
late fall of 1936. The only other solo exhibition of
photographs at An American Place featured the
work of Eliot Porter. The December 1938 show
included black and white wildlife studies and inti-
mate landscapes. Following his experience at An
American Place, the naturalist chose to focus exclu-
sively on his photographic career, eventually pro-
ducing the spectacular color images of nature for
which he is best known.
In the final decade of the gallery, before Stie-
glitz’s death in 1946, photographers continued to
visit or correspond with Stieglitz in hopes of some
acknowledgement from the elder statesman of their
field. La ́szlo ́ Moholy-Nagy, Walker Evans, and
Weegee (Arthur Fellig) all made contact with Stie-
glitz during these years, and for better or worse,
each counted the interaction a significant moment
in their development. The final seasons of An
American Place were devoted to exhibitions of
paintings by O’Keeffe, Dove, and Marin.RACHELArauzAN AMERICAN PLACE