Pamela Colman Smith and Alfred Stieglitz
1996; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/03087298.1996.10443676
ISSN2150-7295
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Art and Culture Studies
ResumoAbstract In the Beinecke Library's Alfred Stieglitz Archive is a group of letters written to Stieglitz between 1907 and 1909 by Pamela Colman Smith (1878–1951), an American feminist painter-illustrator of mixed Anglo-American and AfroCaribbean descent.1 Despite marginalization by most scholars, Smith's Symbolist art and her presence as the only woman of colour in the Stieglitz circle provide a fuller understanding of what has been central in Stieglitz studies: his modernism. In early 1907, Stieglitz gave Smith the first non-photographic exhibition at his gallery ‘291’: 72 mystical, Symbolist watercolours that Smith told him she painted ‘automatically’ — that is, without conscious control — claiming simply to record passively the hermetic visions that came to her unbidden when she listened to music (a crossing of aural and optical sensation called synaesthesia) (figures 1 and 2). Both this ‘automatism’ and Smith's Symbolist subjects — strange goddesses, zodiacal symbols, star-crossed lovers, ancient heroes and folkloric nature-spirits — were remarkably progressive in New York at a time when Naturalism and Impressionism were the ne plus ultra of avant-garde endeavour.2
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