Weather Permitting, On Edward Steichen’s delphiniums by Graham Hamilton in Picpus

Weather Permitting, On Edward Steichen’s delphiniums by Graham Hamilton 

Extended edit - A slightly shorter Version of this text appeared in Picpus # 33 under the title On Edward Steichen’s delphiniums 

For one week during the summer of 1936, the photographer Edward Steichen exhibited cut delphiniums in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I thought I had first encountered Steichen’s show in an Artforum review of Heike-Karin Föll’s work by Quinn Latimer. Latimer’s review features an image of a sculpture by Föll: a bucket full of delphiniums atop a pedestal accompanied by a case of Evian, rebranded with the word “home.” The work is a strange and uncanny homage to Steichen's MoMA installation, a room of delphiniums in large vases on risers. In Latimer’s review she unpacks Elaine Scarry’s essay “Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis (Particularly Delphinium)” which she found on a windowsill in the show. Scarry seems to describe all the space around Steichen’s show––poetry and theory mustered to tell why flowers are the perfect imaginative objects “what is the feeling when image rubs against image?”––but Steichen is nowhere in the text.

That Steichen’s show is so unfindable gives me the feeling of fiction, and so I cling to the text that accompanies it, the press release. It’s a much more pragmatic document than what we are accustomed to in terms of exhibition explication these days. There is no poetry or speculation, but instead a thorough explanation of what to expect. It begins with a caveat, “WEATHER PERMITTING,” which strikes me, despite itself, as a very poetic utterance. This stipulation about the show’s contingency on weather conditions feels like a suggestion that exhibitions are most powerful when they are propositions; opportunities to encounter an event that, between the artist and the viewer, may or may not materialize. We also learn in the release that Steichen's show, two installments of flowers delivered over two weeks, was part of a larger exhibition about modern exhibition architecture––an exhibition specifically about what exhibitions could become.

There may be a page missing, but the press release in Steichen’s bio goes into great detail about his hard scrabble youth and for how long he was so poorly paid for his innovations and organizing of the enterprise of photography. It cuts off in the 1920’s after his heroic photographic service to the Allies in the first war and his final renunciation of painting for photography. At the time of his show Steichen was the most famous and highly paid fashion photographer, some call him the first. First, because he uniquely affixed his name to his commercial and artistic work alike. In 1936 Steichen had already been cultivating Delphiniums for over three decades in France and America; it was also the year of the Berlin games. The Nazis were in power and facism was rising in Europe. Steichen would split with his mentor Alfred Steiglitz first over aesthetic concerns and secondly over Steiglitz’s lingering fondness for Germany. In New York, the great depression was profoundly felt and still lingering.

The show at MoMA is essentially a photo set. The two photographs that accompany the press release on MoMA’s website, are shot by Steichen. In one he stands in the doorway, proudly presenting his stalks, in the other a female model in contemporary mode poses amongst the foliage, next to a small dolphin sculpture. The sculpture by Gaston Lachaise is unlisted in the press release, which goes into great detail about the delphinium and its name: Delphinium from Dolphin, the buds resembling their blue bottlenose, and Dolphin from delphi, the oracle whos birthday was celebrated by a procession of girls with cut flowers. One of the types Steichen cultivated and exhibited was actually named for his brother in law the poet Carl Sandberg––with flowers, poetry haunts the enterprise.

What is not mentioned, the sculpture, like Scarry’s text casually included in Föll’s exhibition, stands in like a model for all the accumulated history of reference. Uncited but present, it creates a contrast to the gesture of real flowers that has neither precedent nor progeny. What is so enigmatic and compelling for me is that in this very interstitial moment of history, in the middle of his career, what Stiechen asserts as an exhibition is beauty represented by its fleetiness, image undone by its subject. I like this exhibition as a proposition that an exhibition itself should be a proposal, temporal and limited. The press release wants to be clear, “to avoid confusion, it should be noted that the actual delphiniums will be shown in the Museum—not paintings or photographs of them. It will be a "personal appearance" of the flowers themselves” When you replace an image of a thing with something as perishable as a flower, you understand that an image is a proposition of immortality. Steichen demonstrates how much he understands his medium this time defining it dialectically with its opposite, decay. How is it a gift? It is the extravagance of their beauty that makes them a gift. I am more interested in the ephemerality, but I like beauty as its vehicle. I know Steichen loved Delphiniums because they were extravagantly beautiful. Flowers are. That I can experience the show only through its documentation, the pictures, maybe exaggerates this feeling of poignancy. It also carries through one more point about what is propositional in photography, an invitation to imagine something that was so totally momentary, a particularly generous and rogue abundance of flowers performing as art, cooly wilting in the museum.