Gertrude Käsebier Sold at Auction Prices

Photographer, b. 1852 - d. 1934

(b Des Moines, Iowa, 1852; d New York, New York, 1934) American photographer. Kasebier attended the Pratt Institute in New York where she studied painting from 1889 to 1893. In 1894 she continued her studies in France and Germany through the following year. She then began to pursue an interest in photography and opened her own portrait studio in New York City. Her most frequently depicted subjects include Robert Henri, Auguste Rodin, Standford White, Evelyn Nesbit and mothers and children. These portraits were recognized in the Philadelphia Photographic Salons as well as numerous other important photographic exhibitions. In 1902, Kasebier founded the Photo-Secession with Alfred Stieglitz, Clarence H. White and Edward Steichen; the following year, her photograph, ‘Blessed Art Thou Among Women’, appeared in the 1903 inaugural issue of Camera Work. Resigning from the Photo-Secession in 1912, Kasebier visited (John Murray) Anderson's family in St. Johns, Newfoundland. She grappled with the challenge of Newfoundland's dim, gray light, making pictures whose stylistic departures reflected her flexible nature. When Newfoundland's weird light did not conform to her tonal approach, she adopted a more linear, architectonic style; an angular, restless quality that may have been induced by Cubist paintings shown at 291 or by Coburn's increasingly geometric style. Following the closure of her portrait studio in the early 1920s, the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences held a retrospective of her work in 1929. Kasebier was involved with the Pictorial Photographers of America from the 1920s into the early 1930s. She is known for altering her negatives and prints through retouching and rephotographing and usually printed in platinum or gum bichromate emulsions.
(Credit: Christie’s, New York, Photographs (Parts I & II), Neptune 7958, October 5, 1994, lot 101)