ABSTRACT Title of Dissertation / Thesis: “LIVING ON PAPER ...

grayish tones and white, also reflect Whistler’s color choices in his famously theatrical
exhibitions of the 1880s. 132
In the third gallery of the Photo-Secession the combination
of gray tones and salmon could have been specifically based upon the “Arrangement in
Flesh Color and Gray” that Whistler used in 1884 to introduce his first exhibited
watercolors and a group of small oil paintings. 133
Steichen remained a crucial part of the Photo-Secession in its first exhibition
season, meticulously hanging the 100 photographs in the first show. Steichen’s own
photographs sold briskly during his one-man show at the Little Galleries in March
1906. 134 The Photo-Secession was launched with a strong first season of photographic
shows in its own galleries, and it continued to mount traveling exhibitions as well. 135
Steichen’s commercial studio, too, was thriving. His very success and financial
stability seemed to make him nervous. As his biographer Penelope Niven observes, “All
his life he would migrate from medium to medium, risk to risk, never settling
permanently into one regimen or enterprise.” 136
Therefore, at this moment of triumph,
Steichen, now married and with a young daughter, decided to return to France. In 1906
he closed up his New York studio and sailed to Europe in a move that would result in the
transformation of Stieglitz’s enterprise from strictly photographic to encompassing the
breadth of modern art.
Anti-Photographic Art Enters 291
On Steichen’s first sojourn in France one of his goals had been to make
photographic portraits of important cultural figures. One of these was the great French
sculptor Auguste Rodin. While Rodin was best known for his ground-breaking sculpture,
by the early twentieth-century he had come to also see his swiftly-drawn contour
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