Reproductie van een ets met een ontwerp voor een theaterdecor 1910

This etching for a theater design was created by Alfred Stieglitz. It’s all vertical lines, like rain, or prison bars, but they open up at the top into bright shafts of light. I can imagine Stieglitz hunched over the plate, etching those lines, a bit obsessive, a bit dreamy. What kind of theater was he imagining? Something dark and mysterious, with maybe a tiny bit of hope. See that little couple down in the corner? They are dwarfed by the set. The texture is everything here. It’s not just about seeing a stage, but about feeling the weight of the darkness, the scratch of the lines, the artist's hand. Stieglitz was into photography, but he was also part of a larger conversation about modernism with painters and sculptors. They were all trying to figure out how to represent the world in a new way, a way that felt true to their experience.