Exhibitions

Eva Watson-Schütze
Photographer

February 14 - June 14, 2009
Howard Greenberg Family Gallery

Carl Eric Linden, ca. 1905............................Walter Weyl, ca. 1905

Eva Watson-Schütze's career as a photographer brought her into contact with people who shaped twentieth-century American culture. As a young woman in the 1890s Eva Watson studied painting with Thomas Eakins and also worked with Alfred Stieglitz, essential figures in the history of American photography. In 1901 she married Martin Schütze, a German professor at the University of Chicago and thereafter was known as Eva Watson-Schütze. In 1902, she became a founding member of the Photo-Secession, organized by Stieglitz to promote aesthetic photography, and Watson-Schütze's rich, soft-focus platinum prints were featured in some of the major exhibitions of the time. After her 1903 summer's residency at the Byrdcliffe Art Colony in Woodstock, she and her husband built a house nearby, where they stayed for several months each year. For the next 20 years Eva Watson-Schütze made portrait photographs of the leading intellectual and creative figures of both Woodstock and Chicago.

Bolton Brown, ca. 1905.................................Jane Byrd Whitehead and Peter, 1905

.....Important examples of Schütze's photographs from all phases of her career are included in this exhibition, curated by Tom Wolf, Professor of Art History at Bard College.  As she eventually specialized in portraits, Watson-Schütze's photographs will be juxtaposed with works or art and literature created by the individuals who sat for her. This exhibition honors the gift to the SDMA from Howard Greenberg of over one hundred Eva Watson-Schütze photographs.