Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery opened Marsden Hartley - recent work on January 22, 1917, near the end of the gallery's final season. The fetched 291 exhibition list, citing Sarah Greenough's National Gallery of Art volume Modern Art and America, dates the show January 22 to February 7. By then 291 had become one of the decisive New York sites for modernism: it had argued for photography as fine art and introduced American audiences to European and American avant-garde work, including Matisse, Cezanne, Picasso, Brancusi, Picabia, John Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe. Hartley's return to 291 in 1917 linked his post-European modernist practice to Stieglitz's circle just before the gallery closed.
The show belongs to the last chapter of 291's role in shaping American modernism.
