Eva Watson-Schütze

Eva Watson-Schütze (1867-1935) was an American photographer and painter who was one of the founding members of the Photo-Secession.

Life

Watson-Schütze, nee Eva Lawrence Watson, was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1867.

In 1883, when she was sixteen, she enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where she studied under well-known painter and photographer Thomas Eakins. Her interests at that time were watercolor and oil painting, and it’s unknown if she took any interests in Eakins’ photography.

Around 1890s Watson began to develop a passion for photography, and soon she was decided to make it her career. Between 1894 and 1896 she shared a photographic studio with another Academy alumna in Philadelphia, and the following year she opened her own portrait studio. She quickly became known for her pictorialist style, and soon her studio was known as a gathering place for photographers who championed this aesthetic vision.

In 1897 she wrote to photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston about her belief in women’s future in photography: “There will be a new era, and women will fly into photography.” [cite book|author=C. Jane Glover|title=The Positive
]

In 1899 she was elected to the Photographic Society of Philadelphia, and she exhibited under the name Eva Lawrence Watson. Photographer and critic Joseph Keiley praised her work, saying she showed “delicate taste and artistic originality”. [cite book|author= Joseph T. Keiley|title=Camera Notes, No.3|year=1900|page=140]

The following year she was a member of the jury for the Philadelphia Photographic Salon. A sign of her stature as a photographer at that time may be seen by looking at the other members of the jury, who were Alfred Stieglitz, Gertrude Kasebier, Frank Eugene and Clarence H. White.

In 1900 Johnston asked her to submit work for a groundbreaking exhibition of American women photographers in Paris. Watson objected at first, saying “It has been one of my special hobbies – and one I have been very emphatic about, not to have my work represented as ‘women’s work’. I want [my work] judged by only one standard irrespective of sex.”cite book|author=Bronwyn A. E. Griffith|title=Ambassadors of Progress: American Women Photographers in Paris, 1900-1901|publisher=Giverny: Musée d’Art Américain |year=2001|pages=178-179] Johnston persisted, however, and Watson had twelve prints – the largest number of any photographer – in the show that took place in 1901.

In 1901 she married Professor Martin Schutze, a German-born and -trained lawyer who had received his Ph.D. in German literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1899. He took a teaching position in Chicago, and soon after the couple moved to that city.

That same year she was elected a member of The Linked Ring. She found the ability to correspond with some of the most progressive photographers of the day very invigorating, and she began to look for similar connections in the U.S.

In 1902 she suggested the idea of forming an association of independent and like-minded photographers to Alfred Stieglitz. They corresponded several times about this idea, and by the end of the year she joined Stieglitz as one of the founding members of the famous Photo-Secession.

About 1903 Watson-Schütze began to spend summers at the Byrdcliffe Colony in the Catskill Mountains of New York. She and her husband later bought land nearby and built a home they called “Hohenwiesen” (High Meadows) where she would spend most of her summer and autumn months from about 1910 until about 1925.

In 1905 Joseph Keiley wrote a lengthy article about her "Camera Work" (No. 9, pp. 23-36), saying she was “one of the staunchest and sincerest upholders of the pictorial movement in America.”

As she began to spend more time at Byrdcliffe her interests in painting were reawakened, and within a few years she was spending more time in front of a canvas than behind a camera. After 1910 she made fewer and fewer photographs, and by 1920 she had ceased photography except for family photos.

In 1929 Watson-Schütze became the director of The Renaissance Society, a non-collecting museum founded in 1915 at the University of Chicago. Under Watson-Schütze's direction from 1929 to 1935, the society presented groundbreaking exhibitions of early modernists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Jean Arp, Joan Miró, and Constantin Brancusi.

Watson-Schütze died in Chicago in 1935.

References

[http://ead.lib.uchicago.edu/view.xqy?id=ICU.SPCL.SCHUTZEEW&c=s University of Chicago Library: Guide to Eva Watson-Schutze Photographs 1902-1939]