ALFRED STIEGLITZ (1864–1946)

The Terminal is one of the earliest and most important of Stieglitz’s New York City images. Taken five years before Eugène Atget famously began documenting the streets of old Paris, The Terminal speaks to the dawning realization in Stieglitz of the potential for artistic expression in his hometown.

'From 1893 to 1895 I often walked the streets of New York downtown, near the East River, taking my hand camera with me. I wandered around the Tombs [jailhouse], the old Post Office, Five Points. I loathed the dirty streets, yet I was fascinated. I wanted to photograph everything I saw,’ he recounted to a friend. '[One day] I found myself in front of the old Post Office. The Third Avenue street railway and the Madison Avenue car systems had their terminals there, opposite the old Astor House. It was extremely cold. Snow lay on the ground. A driver in a rubber coat was watering his steaming car horses. How fortunate the horses seemed, having a human being to tend them … The steaming horses being watered on a cold winter day, the snow-covered streets … [expressed] my own sense of loneliness in my own country' (as quoted in Naef, In Focus: Alfred Stieglitz, p. 12).

Having returned from almost a decade in Europe, lower Manhattan, with its throngs of workers and construction projects, docks, subways and dirty streets, was an utter contrast to picturesque Europe. The grandeur and forces of modernity coarsing through the city, however, inspired a body of work that blazed a trail for the fledgling art of photography. The Terminal, along with The Hand of Man (Lot 133) and The Steerage.

Greenough locates nine large-format photogravures of The Terminal in the following Stieglitz collections: The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; The Art Institute of Chicago; Carl Van Vechten Gallery, Fisk University, Nashville; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Greenough, The Key Set, p. 58).

Please see Lot 133 for notes regarding this lot's important provenance, belonging originally to Stieglitz's close friend and partner, Dorothy Norman.