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These were then becoming increasingly popular due to the emergence of Pictorialism early in the decade. Having taught himself painting, he also devoted his energies to photography, feeding his passion for art by reading books on art history and photography magazines.

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Steichen began his professional career as a lithographer in Milwaukee, in 1898. It stirred up my interest in going to Paris, where artists of Rodin’s stature lived and worked.” (Steichen, A Life in Photography, 1963)

“It was not just the statue of a man it was the very embodiment of a tribute to genius. Steichen (1879-1973), who was not yet one of Pictorialist photography’s foremost exponents, discovered Rodin’s Balzac on seeing the picture illustrating the article in his local paper. Paradoxically, it was because of this scandal that the American photographer Edward Steichen first heard about and eventually met the French sculptor.

The international press got hold of the story about the controversy raging in the Parisian art world, and an article was even published in a Milwaukee (Wis.) paper. Their main criticism, as the French newspapers eagerly reported, concerned Rodin’s aesthetic approach, which challenged the conventional idea of a public monument by not making the writer easily recognizable. The Société des Gens de Lettres, who had commissioned it several years earlier, refused to accept the statue. In 1898, when Rodin first exhibited his monument to Balzac at the Paris Salon, it caused a huge scandal. THE MONUMENT TO BALZAC: A SOURCE OF CONTROVERSY