Edward Steichen's Garden History

Edward Steichen is best known for his fashion photography--in the 1930s he was chief of photography for Condé Nast publications, which included Vogue and Vanity Fair.  But one of the great photographer's lesser known roles was as President of the Delphinium Society of America.

His archives at the Eastman Kodak House contain an entire section known as the Delphinium Papers, devoted to his passion for plant breeding.

Edward Steichen with delphiniums (c. 1938), Umpawaug House (Redding, Connecticut). Photo by Dana Steichen. Gelatin silver print. Edward Steichen Archive, VII. The Museum of Modern Art Archive

 

Edward Steichen (American, b. Luxembourg 1879-1973), Delphiniums,1940, dye imbibition process. Bequest of Edward Steichen by Direction of Joanna T. Steichen © Joanna T. Steichen from the Eastman Kodak Archive blog

In June 1936 his flowers were the subject of an eponymous show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  Edward Steichen’s Delphiniums showed the preternaturally tall, unusually colored delphs for a week, taking pains to remind prospective visitors that the exhibit was not photos of plants, it was the real thing! Unwilling to entrust his precious blooms to some mere art handler, Steichen trucked them to the museum galleries himself from his 400 acre farm (10 planted solely in delphiniums) near Redding, Connecticut. 

Installation view of the exhibition, Edward Steichen's Delphiniums. June 24, 1936 through July 1, 1936. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Photograph by Edward Steichen

It was the first and only MoMA show dedicated to flowers.  

It is now also considered the first intersection between genetic modification and art:   Steichen applied colcichine, a chemical mutagen that induces chromosome doubling, to his delphiniums.  The normal delphinium of the day was three to four feet tall; Steichen's could be seven, as seen below in the white behemoth he named for his brother in-law the poet Carl Sandburg. His most popular variety, the Connecticut Yankee, was named as an homage to Mark Twain and is still commercially available.
 

From left: Carl Sandburg with the "Carl Sandburg" delphinium (c. 1938), Umpawaug House (Redding, Connecticut). Photo by Edward Steichen. Gelatin silver print. Seed packet of "Delphinium Connecticut Yankees," bred by Edward Steichen (c. 1973). Offset, printed in color. Both images Edward Steichen Archive, VII. The Museum of Modern Art Archives

MoMA has also placed on line the original press release for the delphinium exhibition, and this is my favorite bit:

How much does gardenhistorygirl want to see an exhibition of giant delphiniums next to a display of Modern Architecture?  So much. 

The press release records that Steichen had been working on his delphiniums "for twenty-six years", that he had been interested in the cross-breeding and selection of flowers since "thirty years ago" but that his particular interest in delphiniums dated to 1906, which even precedes his time at Voulangis par Crècy-en Brie, a village just northeast of Paris where the Steichens lived from 1908 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914.

It was of that landscape, where Man Ray and Brancusi toasted the poplar column, that his daughter, Mary Steichen Calderone spoke:   "The lovely garden created by my father came to mean as much to him as did the garden at Giverny to Monet—a bottomless well for creativity, peace, challenge, joy, inspiration, surcease, renewal—and sheer sensual pleasure." 

Unknown photographer, Steichen and Kate in the Garden at Voulangis, photograph, Steichen Family Collection, from the US National Gallery of Art

 

Edward Steichen, The Voulangis Garden, May 1908, oil on canvas, Steichen Family Collection, from the US National Gallery of Art.  The woman pictured is Steichen's wife Clara.

  Memories of it remain in his photographs, the Heavy Roses (1914),

and the poplars in a three-color halftone from 1913...

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......could one of these have been the trunk carved by Brancusi?

I have never had success with delphiniums in my brutal Oklahoma summers.  But I will try again, in a rare shady spot in my garden, with Connecticut Yankees, for Edward Steichen's sake. 


Sources:

I first found information on Steichen's delphiniums in an article by Ceila Hartmann at the MoMA blog.

There are two sources I haven't been able to access:  a full account of the exhibit in Gedrim, Ronald J. "Edward Steichen's 1936 Exhibition of Delphinium Blooms," in: History of Photography (vol. 17, No. 4, Winter 1993, London: Taylor and Francis), pp.352-363, and  "Delphinium, delphinium and more delphinium!" by Steichen himself published in the journal of the New York Botanical Garden, The Garden (March 1949).  If you have a copy of either please share them!

The Heavy Roses image is widely available around the web but the one in this post is from Christies, where the original sold for $108,000 in 2005.

See also an enlightening local history article about Steichen's time in Redding Connecticut.

Lumiere Press has published a very beautiful and equivalently expensive volume of newly discovered photos from Steichen's time in Voulangis.

Brancusi in the Garden

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There is one other thing I think of when I think of Romania and that is Brancusi.  In doing the research on Mogosoaia I ran across this wonderful photo of him and Man Ray in Edward Steichen’s garden at Voulangis.

Brancusi had sculpted his 'Column' directly from one of the poplar trees in the garden in 1926; when Steichen moved back to America Brancusi disassembled it, but not before he and Man Ray toasted its health.

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Forgotten Gardens: Magosoaia

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong; And I am Marie of Romania (Dorothy Parker, 1937)

When I think of Romania I think of Ceausescu. And orphans.  But there was a time when the idea of 'Romania' conjured visions both regal and exotic, an explosive combination, when Matisse painted La Blouse Romaine and Marie of Romania glittered across America via luxury train--the Royal Romanian--with an entourage of 85 and jewels in abundance. 

La Blouse Roumaine by Matisse, 1940

Marthe Bibesco (1911) by Giovanni Boldini, via wikimedia commons

And throughout the 1920s and 1930s Marthe Bibesco, friend to Jean Cocteau, Rainer Marie Rilke and Winston Churchill, attracted so many world leaders to her 17th century castle outside of Bucharest  that it was called a second League of Nations. 

Her guests strolled after dinner in new terraced Italianate gardens leading down to a Venetian-style boat landing; appropriate for a building style that blended Ottoman and Byzantine influences in an architectural style known not as Romanian, but as Brancovan, for the famed Prince of Wallachia who built it and whose empire would eventually become one of a crazy quilt of royal principalities (Moldavia, Bukovina, Bessarabia, Transylvania) stitched into our modern 'Romania'. 

Prince Constantin Brancoveanu constructed the palace in 1698-1702 as a summer residence, and along with it an oak-paved road stretching all the way to his city home in the center of Bucharest (and conveniently, over the estates of his rivals).  The road, the Podul Mogoşoaiei,  not so much the castle, was one of the wonders of its time and even well into the nineteenth century, when it was lit by candlelight.

Bucharest Brancoveanu Palace, 1708 [source]

But Mogosoaia, the house, was by then already in a state of protracted disrepair that began with a plundering at the end of Constantin's reign in 1714 and from which it would not emerge until the 1870s when Niculae Bibesco, then reigning Prince of Wallachia, renovated the estate.  He retained the French gardeners Rohan and Montigny (disappointing, that) to 'replant the park', though I could find precious little information about either Rohan and Montigny or this phase of the landscape's life, and it is likely that it was simply a tree-planted plain similar to that shown at the city palace above, though Montigny *may* have been a rosarian and it would have been entirely appropriate for the time period to have added rose gardens around the house.  

But it was Marthe, with a privileged upbringing that included an old Romanian peasant woman retained to teach her the folk tales and traditions of her country, who valued the palace and park enough to save it for future generations.  The task of renovation was largely accomplished by George Matei Cantacuzino, an unjustly forgotten Romanian architect who restored the house and brought the landscape into its present form which he hoped would symbolize all of Romania:

"The idea was to surround this luminous architecture with a landscape at once vast and intimate, rich and calm, possessed of lively contrasts of sunlight and shade, or warmth and cool, of field and water, to evoke the country as a whole, to represent and contain in the way Versailles represents France, the Escorial Spain, and the gardens of Isfahan all the oases of Persia."

[from Cantacuzino's essay "Mogosoaia:  A Palace, A Garden and a Landscape"  (which I haven't been able to find in English) as quoted in Romanian Modernism by Scoffham and Machedon (which is in English)].

A 1932 visitor described it as "an outside marvel, an inside marvel, a marvel around – a marvel from the secret little Florentine garden, in which the rowan grows amid stone slabs along the beautiful and haughty rose, hanging on the vaults extending the old Brancovan kitchen, to the flowered terraces, whose steps are soaked by the foul waters of the lake, on which mirror surface large water lily leaves sprawl. Everything is harmony in this work without dissonances: no broken line, no empty space troubles the eye."

[from the present day website of the Magosoaia palace]

"Mogosoaia is not only a princely residence, a lonely landscape or a great estate. Mogosoaia is a sphere, an entire part of a country, a landscape taken from reminiscence, founded by the creative ambition of a series of generations that organized their lives for the functioning of their principles and their aspirations…. Mogosoaia is not only the image of the past, but also the expression of a live present, the testimony of a becoming. This is why Mogosoaia occupies such a special place among the historical monuments of Romania”

When George Cantacuzino wrote those words, he could not have imagined Mogosoaia's future or his own:  that he would be imprisoned by the communists and his beloved landscape would become a site for hosting homages to a dictator, the orchards cut down, and the garden left to ruin.

But after that long darkness, the restored landscape has absorbed another part of Romania:  it is where they brought the toppled statues of Lenin and former prime minister Petru Groza after the dictators finally fell.   

Iosif Kiraly, Reconstruction (Mogosoaia, Lenin and Groza, 4), 2007-2009, from the exhibit Territories of The In/Human“ (April 30 – August 1, 2010, Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart

Sources:

I first learned of  Magosoaia after randomly stumbling on the next to last photo shown, a 1932 photogravure of the landscape that is part of a set for sale on amazon.   

The other period images are from a dissertation on Romanian architect G.M. Cantacuzino by Dan Teodorovici, available online but in German.  

 Information on Queen Marie's American tour is available at historylink:  see her visit to Seattle, and her dedication of the Maryhill Museum.  See a video of her visit at youtube.

 The best source of information on Mogosoaia's history is the palace's website; it is now a cultural center.