Look Closer: Edward Steichen’s Sunflower
Before the photographer left painting behind forever, he attempted to refocus it on nature.
Edward Steichen was one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. His work ranged from the muffled light and shadow of his early landscapes to the snappy glamour of his fashion photography and celebrity portraits (Greta Garbo, Charlie Chaplin, Anna May Wong). He had trained, however, as a painter immersed in Parisian Postimpressionism.
Steichen’s experiences during World War I, serving with U.S. forces in aerial-photography units, left him with a crisis of faith in modern painting. He felt that, in turning away from nature, it had lost the “basic discipline” of engaging with an objective world shared by others.
Seeking a corrective, he turned to the golden ratio (commonly approximated to 1.618), recognized since antiquity as both appealing to the human eye and visible in natural growth patterns. A classic example is the spiral seed-packing pattern in a sunflower head. The concentric circles in this painting might not look much like a sunflower—where is the fringe of pointy petals?—but if you measure their diameters, moving outward from green to cloudy mustard to lemon yellow to pink, you’ll find that their rate of expansion echoes the golden ratio. Steichen’s construction may look abstract, but he isn’t leaving nature behind; he’s illuminating its mechanisms.
Still, painting fell short: Steichen wanted “to reach into the world, to participate and communicate.” He chose to leave France for New York, and leave painting for a job as chief photographer at Vogue and Vanity Fair. He gathered his remaining canvases in his garden and burned them. This one, already in the possession of a friend, escaped.
This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “Le Tournesol (The Sunflower).”
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