Eva Watson-Schütze

Eva Watson- Schütze ( * 1867 in Jersey City, † 1935 in Chicago) was an American painter and photographer of pictorialism. She was a founding member of the Photo-Secession.

Life

Eva Watson began in 1883 at the age of 16 to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where she attended the class of Thomas Eakins. She practiced primarily in watercolor and oil painting. Whether she was influenced by Eakins in photographic terms, is not known. In 1890, she dealt exclusively with photography.

From 1894 to 1896 she shared a photo studio with Amelia Van Buren, also a graduate of the Academy in Philadelphia. Following Watson opened her own portrait studio. Your pictorialistischer style was soon attracted general attention, and contemporary photographers praised its aesthetic point of view. In a letter to the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1897, she expressed confidence as far as the role of women in photography. In 1899 she was elected a member of the Photographic Society of Philadelphia and presented under the name Eva Lawrence Watson from. The following year she was elected to the side of Frank Eugene, Gertrude Käsebier, Alfred Stieglitz and Clarence Hudson White in the jury of the Company.

1901 she took on the insistence of Frances Johnston on a groundbreaking exhibition of American photographers in Paris. In the same year she married the German -born lawyer and literature professor Martin Schütze. The couple moved to Chicago, where Martin Schütze took a chair. 1902 Eva Watson -Schütze was offered membership in the prestigious London Linked Ring. The local exchange with other progressive photographer she found very stimulating. In the suggestion to create a similar organization in the United States, she corresponded with Alfred Stieglitz. Towards the end of the year she was together with Stieglitz founding member of the Photo-Secession.

The summer of 1903 spent Watson -Schütze in the Byrdcliffe Colony, an artists' colony of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Woodstock. There she acquired with her husband a piece of land on which they built a summer house, which they called " High Meadows " called. From 1905 to about 1925, the couple spent the summer and autumn months there.

Joseph Keiley 1905 published in Camera Work, a comprehensive portrait of Eva Watson -Schütze in which he called " a tribute to the most reliable and sincere advocates of pictorialistischen movement in America. " ( Camera Work 9, 1905, pages 23-36 )

In Byrdcliffe Watson -Schütze found again her interest in painting. After 1910, she photographed only rarely, from the 1920s are only family photos of her known. In 1929, she was director of the Renaissance Society, an art gallery that was founded in 1915 on the grounds of the University of Chicago. Under Watson contactor board of trustees from 1929 to 1935, the Society was important exhibitions of artists of classical modernism, such as Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso.

Eva Watson -Schütze died in 1935 in Chicago.