By Carol Howard
In a black-and-white photograph taken around 1938, Carl Sandburg kneels before the stem of a towering delphinium and gazes up toward its cluster of florets. At the time, the famous poet and biographer was visiting the sprawling Connecticut flower farm of his equally famous brother-in-law, the photographer Edward Steichen. Steichen took the photo, and the stylized pose in which he places his subjects—man and flower—creates a dramatic effect of the sort he had perfected during his two decades as New York’s premier fashion photographer and portraitist.
Cristina Reitz-Krueger, artist
In 1938, Sandburg was 60, and Steichen was 59. They had met 30 years earlier, at the Steichen family farm in Wisconsin, shortly before Sandburg’s marriage to Steichen’s younger sister, Lilian. Over the years, the two men became close friends and collaborators.
As a young man, Steichen had moved to Paris to study painting, and, after marrying his first wife, Clara, he and his young family leased a house and garden in the French farming village of Voulangis. It was there that he began growing poppies, petunias and roses, as well as award-winning delphinium hybrids. He had inherited his love for gardening from his immigrant father, who found solace in tending his vegetable plot when he could no longer work in the midwestern copper mines that had ruined his health.
Lilian Steichen Sandburg, who also inherited a love for farm and garden, was a political organizer and intellectual who became as expert with goat breeding as her brother did with hybridizing delphiniums. In part because she wanted to expand her farming operation, the Sandburgs moved to the Connemara estate in Flat Rock in 1945. At Connemara, Lilian gained international renown for her prize-winning goats.
Long before the Sandburgs settled in Flat Rock, in 1928, Steichen and his second wife, Dana, purchased a 240-acre farm in CT. Just as he had earlier sought a retreat in the countryside outside of Paris, the New England property offered respite from the bustle of Manhattan. Once again, he turned his attention to delphiniums. He developed hybrids in a range of blue, purple and white hues and some were reported to grow to 7 feet in height.
Less than a decade after he acquired the farm, the Museum of Modern Art held a one-of-kind show called Steichen Delphiniums. In an avant-garde challenge to the traditional boundaries of art, the week-long installation was dedicated neither to the artist’s photography, nor to his lesser-known paintings, but to his living flower hybrids.
In a much smaller modernist gesture, two years after the MoMA show, Steichen left uncropped the photo of Sandburg and the delphinium. The hands of whichever family member he instructed to hold aloft the photo’s rigid black backdrop are made visible, and the viewer can also glimpse the house and farm beyond the frame. Although his subjects are carefully posed, Steichen gives the viewer the sense that his main purpose was to capture the mood of a family outing in order to introduce his brother-in-law to the magisterial hybrid
“Carl Sandburg,” that he had affectionately named in the poet’s honor.
To learn more about the Carl Sandburg Home in Flat Rock, visit nps.gov/carl/index.htm. The standard biographies of both Sandburg and Steichen are by Penelope Niven. Carol Howard is associate provost at Warren Wilson College.
