“What is 291?”

Abstract “What is 291?” The results of this survey, issued in 1914 by the photographer Alfred Stieglitz to artists, writers, and patrons of his gallery, known by its address at 291 Fifth Avenue, were published in his magazine Camera Work (1903–1917). However, just as Stieglitz was issuing the questionnaire, his associates—Marius de Zayas, Paul Haviland, Agnes Ernst Meyer, and Francis Picabia—were already planning a magazine called 291 (1915–1916), thereby transforming the question even as it was being asked. Read as a response to the questionnaire, the publication 291 destabilizes and amplifies the community Stieglitz had established, while visually embedding its history into the pages of the new magazine. Taking 291 as a case study of the avant-garde and its legacies, this essay traces the origins of the magazine from its predecessors—that is, the periodical Camera Work and the gallery 291—to consider “What is 291?” and its afterlife. Emerging from the intersection of a magazine and gallery as a new iteration of print culture, 291 worked to expand the American avant-garde and to reimagine the magazine as a medium.