Ansel Adams characterized Steichen's tenure at the Museum of Modern Art as a "body blow to the progress of creative photography," and there were many at the museum who agreed with that assessment. According to Barbara Haskell in the catalog for the current show at the Whitney, which she curated, "Even before [Steichen's] appointment was made official in July 1947, the department's longtime curator, Beaumont Newhall, had resigned in protest, along with all 30 members of the [museum's] Advisory Committee of Photography," which included some of the weightiest reputations in the field.

The fact is, critical opinion was often skeptical about Steichen's work almost from the outset of his career, and it was from the outset that his talents commanded attention. At the age of 20, Steichen–who had left school after the eighth grade–was working as a designer of stylish advertisements in a lithography firm in Milwaukee. (The catalog of the Whitney show reproduces an ad, featuring a voluptuous female in a negligee, for a candy laxative called Cascarets from an 1899 issue of Collier's Weekly Magazine .) At 23, however, he had already negotiated his first change of direction, from the world of advertising art to the creation of painting and photography in the reigning Aesthetic-Pictorial style. It was at that early age that Sadakichi Hartman, the most gifted critic of the period, praised Steichen as "thoroughly modern, the 'enfant terrible' of the American school," while at the same time observing that "he does not see his subjects with his own eyes.… The impress of absolute personality does not distinguish his work."

The "impress of absolute personality" is not, perhaps, to be expected in the work of a young artist–except, of course, in the case of real genius–yet about the young Steichen, Hartman's observation would prove to be prophetic. For at no time in his very long career would Steichen "see his subjects with his own eyes." He was, however, a masterly appropriator of other people's "eyes," and largely dependent upon them at virtually every turn in the development of his own work.

He was also a shrewd judge of where the currents of cultural fashion were heading, and quick to avail himself of the opportunities they offered. If an advantageous alliance with Stieglitz required a commitment to an extreme aestheticism, Steichen was eager to provide it–and no less eager to repudiate it when opportunity beckoned elsewhere. When ostentatious glamour was the ticket to fame and fortune in the 1920's, Steichen went for it, signing up with Condé Nast to meet monthly deadlines photographing celebrities for Vanity Fair and fashion models for Vogue . "He became America's most highly paid photographer," writes Ms. Haskell, "as celebrated as the people he photographed."

Ms. Haskell would have us believe that Steichen's photographs for Vogue "proposed a new prototype of female beauty" and "codified the image of the liberated woman that emerged after World War I." She even goes so far as to characterize the results of this descent into the realm of make-believe glamour as "inherently populist," forgetting perhaps what sort of market Steichen was serving in his Vogue and Vanity Fair pictures.

Still, when social conscience became the vogue in the 1930's, Steichen was more than ready to join that bandwagon, too. In 1929, he was already declaring that "art for art's sake was dead," but he still vigorously defended commercial photography, fatuously asserting that "there has never been a period when the best thing we had was not commercial art." Less than a decade later, he announced his retirement from commercial photography. The heightened political atmosphere of the Depression era had finally gotten to him, whetting his appetite for yet another change of direction–as propagandist for the "little guy."

In 1938, writes Ms. Haskell, "Steichen saw an exhibition that included photographs of rural poverty taken under the auspices of the federal government's Resettlement Administration (RA) and Farm Security Administration (FSA). In his report on the exhibition for U.S. Camera , he heralded these visual records of Depression-era America as 'the most memorable human documents that were ever rendered in pictures.'" If it was too late for Steichen to join this movement as a photographer, he nonetheless began to harbor an ambition to serve its political goals as an organizer of large-scale war-themed exhibitions.

It was World War II that provided Steichen with the opportunity to pursue this last and most successful of all his ambitions. In September 1941, he was asked by MoMA to organize an exhibition on the theme of national defense, to be called The Arsenal of Democracy . When the United States entered the war three months later, the project was re-named Road to Victory . It was his success with this project that led to his appointment as MoMA's photography czar when the war was over.

During the war, Steichen had also placed his vision of photography as "a medium of persuasion" at the service of the U.S. Navy, and the instructions he gave to the photographers under his command nicely sum up the spirit that governed all of his work as an organizer of big-theme shows. "Don't photograph the war," Steichen is reported to have said. "Photograph the man, the little guy, the struggle, the heartaches, plus the dreams of this guy." The transformation of the fickle aesthete and the eager huckster into a master purveyor of progressivist sentimentalities was complete, though Steichen would have to wait until a decade after the war before he could score his greatest triumph, The Family of Man exhibition at MoMA in 1955.

Edmund Wilson once wrote that "one is tempted to feel that the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg," and I harbor a similar tendency to feel that The Family of Man was the single worst thing ever to be inflicted upon the art of photography. (Sandburg, by the way, was Steichen's brother-in-law and sometime collaborator.) I loathed the exhibition at the time and wrote one of the few negative reviews of what remains, to this day, the single most widely seen photography exhibition in the history of the medium.

The fragments of The Family of Man that are included in the current show at the Whitney do nothing to persuade me otherwise. It still strikes me as progressivist cant from start to finish, with its phony parallels of "families" the world over and its reduction of all human life to a few simple-minded liberal formulas. This was an exhibition that corrupted the meaning of virtually every photographic image it embraced. No wonder so many serious photographers despised it.

As a historical account of one of the most overrated reputations in the annals of American photography, the current show at the Whitney is not without interest, to be sure; but for anyone with a serious grasp of photography as an art, this retrospective is a depressing experience. Steichen's work doesn't finally lend itself to a retrospective on this scale. And it suffers from the additional handicap of having been organized by a curator who does not seem to be at home in either the history or the aesthetics of photography. If Ms. Haskell really believes Walker Evans looked upon his "photographs as tools to effect social change," as she writes on this occasion, then she is definitely in the wrong field. But with the Giorgio Armani fashion show at the Guggenheim and the Open Ends show at MoMA, this Steichen retrospective doesn't even have the distinction of being the worst of the exhibitions on offer in the museums at the moment. It remains on view at the Whitney through Feb. 4.

But the combination of artistic talent and suave style that makes Mr. Clemente an appealing candidate for a Guggenheim exhibition has flopped out of town. The standard practice for a museum exhibition of this size is to ship it to several other cities afterward to defray the costs, which can be upward of several hundred thousand dollars. According to Lisa Dennison, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim, and the show's organizer, the museum approached more than 25 American and European museums, and actually had some interest from the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But none of those venues decided to take the show. Instead, when the New York exhibition closes on Jan. 9, it will go directly to the Guggenheim branch in Bilbao, Spain, from Feb. 14 to June 4.

"In the end, it is always a question of timing or changes in leadership," said Ms. Dennison.

But size might have also mattered, as well as differences in taste. "The thing is that this is a large exhibition. It would have taken up the whole San Francisco Museum of Modern Art," said Ms. Dennison. "A lot of times when you are dealing with contemporary art-and we would have to say that Francesco is a contemporary artist-the directors of museums prefer to have their own curators organize these shows, because the work is open to interpretation. It is different from, say, a Mondrian show, where everyone simply wants it."

Ms. Dennison argued that shipping the show to Bilbao will help absorb some of the cost to the New York branch. So will the sponsorship of Hugo Boss, who it seems underwrites almost every one of the museum's New York shows and is sponsoring Clemente's. "Our whole rationale for the globalization of the Guggenheim-for having our own network of museums-is to not have to engage in that kind of negotiation with other institutions for shows but to know that from the beginning we have a partner in Europe, and we know that we have covered our development costs for the project because two institutions are involved," she said. "We have economies of scale in terms of staffing and fund-raising efforts. From time to time we are going to partner with other institutions, but we don't have to because our utmost priority is to have the show at the Guggenheim."

The museum in Bilbao still has to find a sponsor to pay for the underlying costs of the four-month-long Clemente show, some of which go toward shared costs with the Guggenheim in New York. "All venues of a tour eventually have to find additional sponsorship," said Ms. Dennison. With its Frank Gehry-designed building, the museum in Bilbao has attracted a great deal of attention, and finding a sponsor should not be difficult.

Steichen Family Album At Auction

Edward Steichen, the elegant photographer who captured the glamour of New York and France before World War II, and then went on to snap Hollywood celebrities as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair , is probably best remembered today as the curator of the 1955 Museum of Modern Art's The Family of Man Exhibition . Steichen, who was then an elder statesman in the field, took 503 photographs and divided them into such general categories as creation, birth, love, work, death, justice, democracy and peace. As naive as the show's premise seems today-in the world of Nan Goldin and Andres Serrano-it marked a turning point for photography by suggesting that the medium could aspire to universal themes the same way as do other major art forms.

On Oct. 5, Steichen's granddaughter, Linda Joan Steichen Hodes, is putting 25 of his photographs up for auction at Phillips Auctioneers (406 East 79th Street). The pictures, which are portraits of the artist's family, will be on exhibit at the auction house starting Oct. 1.

Until now, little has been known about Steichen's own family, which consisted of two daughters and three wives. Like most families, the Steichens had some skeletons in the closet. Steichen's first wife, Clara, was mentally ill, and he was prohibited for a time from seeing one of his daughters, Kate Rodina Steichen. But overall, he was an extremely devoted family man who entertained a stream of visitors at Umpawaug, his glass house on a pond in Connecticut, until his death in 1973.

"I know that he had lots of other qualities that I never saw, but he was-with me and anywhere around me-the most steady, profoundly loving man," said Ms. Hodes, who referred to Steichen as "the main man in my life."

"My overall sense of Bumpa, as I called my grandfather, was that his most profound connections were to children (especially his own), his beloved dogs, gardens, wilderness and the earth," said Ms. Hodes.

Her mother, Mary Steichen Calderone, was a physician and expert in human sexuality who is credited with introducing sex education in American schools. Her mother, who died in 1998, left several boxes of family photographs to her, as did her Aunt Kate. She said she discovered, after going through the boxes, that she had a surplus of Steichen photographs.

As Information Age speculation remakes American wealth on a scale not seen since J. Pierpont Morgan strutted onto the world banking stage, the lives of our founding financiers are undergoing necessary rehabilitation. Last year's Titan , Ron Chernow's life of John D. Rockefeller, demonstrated that a monumental saga of a homespun outsider–"mega-billionaire nerd" would be today's Gatesian analog–is still one of our meritocracy's favorite bedtime stories. The life of Pierpont Morgan is an even more fabulous tale. Once upon a time, it might have been dreamed up by the F. Scott Fitzgerald of "The Rich Boy," the worldly storyteller who always wrote best through the eyes of a Midwesterner drawn East as to the realm of Midas.

Morgan literally turned America to gold, saving the gold standard in 1895, and regulating the flow of gold in and out of the United States. He commanded a banking empire that was global in scope; the depth and magnitude of its resources remain unparalleled in modern times. At home, Morgan acted as a one-man central bank, more than once saving the United States from bankruptcy and panic. Consolidating competing companies into vast "combines" in a process that came to be known as "Morganization," he helped to build the foundation on which the American industrial pyramid was raised. Even his nose, ruptured by a chronic skin disorder, was declared by Morgan to be "part of the American business structure."

For all his wealth, he would have looked down that nose at a diamond as big as the Ritz. He typified an age when character was everything. Trusted by kings and nations all over the world, he ruled by force of character. His word was the gold standard, and he knew the power of silence. Morgan rarely gave interviews or speeches. His last will expressed his doctrinal belief in atonement through Christ's sacrifice, yet elicited disbelieving headlines: "Morgan Gives Soul to Maker, Money to Son." For years after his death, no collection of letters surfaced. He left no published works. He hid from history. A consummate New Yorker, however, he continued to make eye contact.

All through the 20th century, novelists have looked into Morgan's "small black magpie's eyes"–the phrase is from John Dos Passos' 1919 . In Ragtime , E.L. Doctorow depicted Morgan with "eyes set just close enough to suggest the psychopathology of his will." At century's end, the J.P. Morgan that we still picture–the glowering trust king, his blighted nose airbrushed, the hard black eyes pricked by light, an aquiline claw choking the polished arm of his chair–comes to us from an image captured in 1903. The 24-year-old Edward Steichen, given two minutes to make a photograph for Morgan's official portrait painter, took several exposures that duplicated the official pose, then suggested that Morgan "swing" his head into a casual pose. Morgan refused. Defiant, he squared off with Steichen, stared down his opponent, and voilà –there sat the real "Napoleon of Wall Street," a sinister icon of the Gilded Age.

Several other J.P. Morgans remain visible around town. A saintly Morgan surfaces in his rare book and manuscript collections, art collections, institutional philanthropy, and high church Episcopal faith–all still on view in the white marble Pierpont Morgan Library on East 36th Street, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where Morgan was president) and the ivy-covered St. George's Church on Stuyvesant Square (where he was senior warden). As the marquee player in Ron Chernow's award-winning history, House of Morgan , Morgan reappeared in 1990 as a restless, conflicted giant: straitlaced yet sybaritic; theatrical but schooled in concealment; tenderhearted in his love for his doomed first wife, cruel to the long-lived second Mrs. Morgan; puritanical in his standards, fatally attracted to sassy showgirls. In short, a sacred monster.

The Morgan that Jean Strouse has brought to life in her masterful, long-awaited biography is deeply human, the most intricate and integrated portrait we have yet had. This Morgan is stripped of varnish but remains grandly scaled and exquisitely rendered. Ms. Strouse, a gutsy, sympathetic writer, whose first biography, Alice James , turned the neglected diarist and remarkable younger sister of William and Henry James into an unexpectedly complex figure, has produced an equally brilliant work with a vastly more intimidating subject.

Morgan has frustrated no fewer than 11 biographers. In Ms. Strouse he has met his match. By measuring her commitment to Morgan in decades, she has made herself into much more than a mere expert on a mythic American financier or a talking head on international finance. As with Alice James, she has created a living relationship with her subject.

An exemplar in American biography, Ms. Strouse sees deeply into the forest by chopping down every tree. She mills the lumber by hand and searches the grain in the wood for the hidden history it reveals. She writes from the inside out, seeing her character's choices and alternatives as they saw them. In the process, her judgment is honed razor-sharp: She alone can reject legends and spurious anecdotes that other Morgan biographers have fallen for, because she alone knows every leaf in the forest.

Working archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Ms. Strouse uncovered significant new evidence about Morgan's public and private lives. In the inner sanctum of the Morgan Library, she dusted off Morgan's childhood diaries and adult letters and business correspondence–a trove that had been seen and used selectively only by Morgan's authorized biographer, a son-in-law. But the Morgan that Ms. Strouse had at first thought she was looking for–"a modified, human-scale version" of the villain in Steichen's portrait–failed to appear. To make matters worse, as she sifted through the testimony of those who had known Morgan, she found his critics more persuasive, better speakers and writers, than his advocates, who seemed "defensive and fawning."

At that point, five years into the work, a more commercial biographer might have gone ahead and fit the evidence to a pre-emptively conceived characterization. Ms. Strouse, however, dumped her first draft and hunkered down to re-examine the Morgan she had encountered in the archives, a Morgan who was "sociable and shy, deliberate and impulsive, ingenuous and shrewd, domineering and flexible, exuberant and depressive, extravagant and frugal, worldly and religious, inscrutably reserved and deeply sentimental." In short, a man.

The complex process of Ms. Strouse's off-page responses is important to note because, although unseen, it gives her storytelling the richness and penetration of a novel. Ms. Strouse was ideally prepared to understand the hypochondria of the "most powerful man of the late 19th century"–her previous experience, after all, was with a "powerless female invalid in a family of intellectuals." Surprisingly, Morgan fell apart almost as frequently as Alice James did; and Ms. Strouse is expert at detecting the real reasons behind Victorian breakdowns for which no organic cause has been found. She traces the internal logic of Morgan's lifelong battles with depression, anxiety, abandonment and "astringent perfectionism," and her efforts make this a groundbreaking interpretation.

But the most remarkable feat in Morgan is the way Alice James' biographer has successfully recast herself as an economic historian. After the Civil War, when the American economy exploded, J.P. Morgan was both supplying the dynamite and steadying the ground. No one did more to transform the rural agrarian republic into a modern industrial empire. As she tells this story, at each crucial step in the national metamorphosis, Ms. Strouse salts her narrative with brisk, clear analysis of the economic principles that were shaping Morgan's public actions. Her chapter on the panic of 1907 could serve as a model of suspenseful storytelling or an introduction to modern economics.

Her mastery of detail allows her to use previously overlooked nuggets to help us understand what money meant to a man of unlimited wealth. We know, for example, that Morgan paid $300 to send a substitute to the Civil War. But what exactly did $300 signify to him in 1863? Poring over the account books from J. Pierpont Morgan & Company, Ms. Strouse noticed what Morgan spent on cigars for himself and his father in 1863: $300.

Morgan was scoured by doubts all his life, yet he ignored his critics, starting with his parents and teachers and ending with the American public. That hubris, Ms. Strouse reveals, lies closer to the root of his real isolation than the unreality of his wealth. During the acute nervous collapse that followed Morgan's testimony before the Pujo Committee in 1912, which led, ultimately, to his decline the following year, the great emperor of money found himself reduced to a state of "childlike dependence." Rumors of Morgan's breakdown in Egypt and subsequent "nerve storms" in Rome caused jitters on Wall Street.

When death finally came, it was caused most likely by a series of small strokes he had already suffered on the Nile, followed by the coup de grâce in Rome. True to form, however, Ms. Strouse has dug up a certificate filed by Italian authorities, stating that Morgan died of "psychic dyspepsia," a nicely Jamesian ending to the story of the Ozymandian banker whose death closed out the 19th century and whose life reopens our eyes to the creation of modern America.