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warm-toned, titled, dated, and annotated in unidentified hands in pencil on the reverse, matted, 1924

LITERATURE AND REFERENCES

Steichen the Photographer (The Museum of Modern Art, 1961), p. 27

Edward Steichen, A Life in Photography, (New York, 1963), pl. 28

Barbara Haskell, Edward Steichen (Whitney Museum of American Art, 2000), p. 79

Barbara Haskell, The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-1950 (Whitney Museum of American Art, 1999), pl. 246

Joanna Steichen, Steichen's Legacy: Photographs, 1895-1973 (New York, 2000), pl. 79

Cleveland Amory and Frederic Bradlee, Vanity Fair: A Cavalcade of the 1920s and 1930s (New York, 1960), p. 151

Diana Edkins, Vanity Fair: Photographs of an Age, 1914-1936 (New York, 1982), p. 83

Peter Galassi, American Photography 1890-1965 (The Museum of Modern Art, 1995), p. 125

Sarah Greenough, Joel Snyder, David Travis, and Colin Westerbeck, On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Photography (National Gallery of Art and Art Institute of Chicago, 1989), p. 284

Maria Morris Hambourg and Christopher Phillips, The New Vision: Photography Between the World Wars, Ford Motor Company Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1988), p. 33

Photographie (Paris: Arts et Metiers Graphiques, 1930, reprinted in 1980), p. 101

CATALOGUE NOTE

The print offered here is a rare, vintage example of one of Steichen's most iconic and frequently reproduced photographs. At this writing, only two other vintage prints of this image are believed to have been offered at auction: Sotheby's New York, 7 October 1993, Lot 118; and Christie's New York, 4 October 1994, Lot 15. Another vintage print, a close variant of the image offered here, was sold in these rooms on 27 April 2004, Lot 24.

In 1923, Steichen began working for Condé Nast where he was charged with photographing prominent people for Vanity Fair and producing fashion photographs for Vogue. While up to this point Steichen's photographic efforts had been directed primarily toward artistic ends, he was immediately successful in his new role as a commercial photographer, and the appearance of his elegant and glamorous images in the pages of the best magazines of the day raised the aesthetic standards for magazine photography. Steichen's formidable photographic talent put him at the very top of any photographic genre he chose to explore, from pictorialism to war photography, and this was a trend that asserted itself several times throughout the photographer's career.

If Steichen was at the top of his field when he made this mysterious and alluring portrait of the famed actress Gloria Swanson (1897-1983), so was his subject. Swanson, who began her acting career in the days of silent film, became the highest-paid woman in the world in the 1920s. A businesswoman, as well as an actress, Swanson produced a number of her own films. This portrait was published in the February 1928 issue of Vanity Fair with the caption 'Gloria Swanson: The star has made a film version of Miss Thompson, the [Somerset] Maugham story which is better known as 'Rain." The movie was released under the title Sadie Thompson, and also starred Lionel Barrymore. Swanson received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for her role as a prostitute stranded on the island of Pago Pago. The film also was nominated for its cinematography.

In his autobiography, A Life in Photography, Steichen gave a vivid description of the sitting:

'The day I made...[these pictures]...Gloria Swanson and I had had a long session, with many changes of costume and different lighting effects. At the end of the session, I took a piece of black lace veil and hung it in front of her face. She recognized the idea at once. Her eyes dilated and, and her look was that of a leopardess lurking behind leafy shrubbery, watching her prey. You don't have to explain things to a dynamic and intelligent personality like Miss Swanson. Her mind works swiftly and intuitively' (A Life in Photography, Chapter 8, unpaginated).