9 04 ‘ 2022   museomag 
ERWIN OLAF & HANS OP DE BEECK: 
INSPIRED BY STEICHEN (1/2) 
NATURE AS A SOURCE OF INSPIRATION 
One of the few positive side effects of the global 
outbreak of Covid-19, may have been the fact that 
many people reconnected with nature in the past 
two years. We were walking, running or cycling more 
often. The absence of cars and big crowds meant 
that animals started to venture into our immediate 
surroundings, there was less noise overall and more 
to quietly listen to and enjoy. A stay in nature does 
a person good and so does some exercise: “mens 
sana in corpore sano” (a healthy mind or spirit in a 
healthy body). 
As for the breath of that spirit, inspiration, the 
same certainly applies to many an artist in the 
recent period. To them, the natural environment was 
an important source of artistic ideas – as it frequently 
was, by the way, throughout art history. The latter 
is certainly true for one of the most famous artists 
with Luxembourg roots, the photographer Edward 
Steichen (1879-1973). 
STEICHEN AND HIS ARTISTIC LEGACY 
Born in Luxembourg, raised in Wisconsin and trained 
as a lithographer’s apprentice, Steichen took up 
photography in his teens and by age twenty-three 
Erwin Olaf (*1959), Am Wasserfall (Im Wald), 2020. Photograph, Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta, 160 x 240 cm. Courtesy of the artist. 
had created brooding tonalist landscapes and brilliant 
psychological studies that won the praise of Alfred 
Stieglitz in New York and Auguste Rodin in Paris, 
among others. Over the next decade, this young 
man – the preferred portraitist of the elite of two 
continents – was repeatedly acclaimed as the unsur- 
passed master of the painterly photograph. Among his 
earliest works is a relatively small group of landscape 
photographs, including Moonrise – Mamaroneck, New 
York (1904). Steichen shot this view near the home of 
one of his friends, art critic Charles Caffin. The photo- 
graph depicts a wooded area and a pond with the 
moon shining through the trees, its light reflected in 
the water. It suggests the moon’s beauty and mystery, 
the silvery quality of its light and its illusory proximity to 
the earth. With images like this, Steichen was declaring 
photography’s great artistic potential, placing it on 
a par with painting and drawing and arguing for its 
inclusion in the fine arts. The Pond: Moonrise became 
an iconic work. In February 2006 the 41 x 50 cm photo- 
graph put up for auction at Sotheby’s in New York by 
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which already had 
another, slightly different version of the print in its 
extensive collection. Although it was expected to reach 
a high price, the art world was stunned when it more