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
