Lisa Oppenheim: Monsieur Steichen

In February 2025, Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean will present Monsieur Steichen, a new exhibition by American artist Lisa Oppenheim. Through photographic, textile and floral works, Oppenheim will present an unexpected portrait of Edward Steichen, one of the most renowned yet enigmatic figures in twentieth-century photography.

For two decades, Lisa Oppenheim (1975, New York) has been exploring photography’s history and its latent possibilities. In Monsieur Steichen, she focuses on lesser-known aspects of the work of Edward Steichen (1879, Bivange, Luxembourg–1973, Redding, Connecticut): his lifelong passion for flowers, his textile designs and his experimentations in the field of colour photography. The works produced for this exhibition build upon what the artist describes as Steichen’s “lost threads” and “discarded ideas,” which are reimagined through her own artistic approach.

The exhibition opens with a series of photographic prints in which Oppenheim revives a now extinct variety of iris named “Monsieur Steichen.” She imagines how this flower, created in 1910 by a French amateur botanist as a tribute to Edward Steichen, could have looked using two distinct techniques: dye transfer printing, employed by Steichen in his colour experiments of the 1930s–40s, and artificial intelligence, a transformative technology in contemporary image-making.

Another series revisits Steichen’s influential mid-1920s textile designs for the Stehli Silks “Americana” collection. Steichen’s designs are considered to be important because they were among the first to be created from photographs of everyday objects. In collaboration with fashion designer Zoe Latta, Oppenheim developed a collection of new fabrics based on motifs that Steichen ultimately did not use in his final works—several floral patterns and a striking, almost abstract photograph of gravel—reimagining these designs for today.

Four folding screens covered in these fabrics will display a selection of photographs by Steichen chosen by Lisa Oppenheim from the collection of the Musée national d’archéologie, d’histoire et d’art, Luxembourg. These works emphasise the under-recognised yet pivotal role of women in Steichen’s life and work. Alongside advertising images, the exhibition features portraits of Steichen’s mother, Marie Kemp Steichen, and the three women he married: Clara E. Smith, Dana Desboro Glover and Joanna Taub.

Additional works will complete the exhibition, including Oppenheim’s experimental photographic Steichen Studies (2024), which will offer visitors a glimpse into her creative process. These pieces will engage in a dialogue with a floral composition (Steichen Bouquet, 2025) which will evolve throughout the exhibition, reflecting the colour variations found in Steichen’s own experiments in a series of dye transfer prints (Bouquet of Flowers, 1940).

With the exhibition Monsieur Steichen, Lisa Oppenheim presents a subjective and abstract portrait of a pivotal twentieth-century figure, seen in the light of the present. Through her explorations of hybridisation—between techniques, disciplines, media, as well as between her own work and that of Steichen—she invites us to reimagine the infinite transformative potential of the image.

Lisa Oppenheim states: “In this exhibition, I would like to inhabit Steichen’s practice rather than examine any particular project. I plan to do with Steichen’s work what he did throughout his own long life and career: inhabit his tendency to ingest and reconstitute a wide range of practices and ideas and in that way hopefully expand an understanding of what it is to be a cultural producer.”

Curators: Christophe Gallois, assisted by Nathalie Lesure