STEICHEN: A Biography. <i> By Penelope Niven</i> . <i> Clarkson Potter: 754 pp., $45</i> : REAL FANTASIES: Edward Steichen’s Advertising Photography. <i> By Patricia Johnston</i> . <i> University of California Press: 384 pp., $55</i>

Who can say where the work begins and the life ends, as William Butler Yeats so elegantly put it? The mystery is, after all, a high dialectical drama which has seized so many American artists over the modernist century now waning. We can probe all the way back to Walt Whitman to find the poet making ends meet by writing for the Brooklyn Eagle and working as a field nurse during the Civil War; Hart Crane surviving at his day job for a few months on Madison Avenue as a copywriter so that he could write drink-fueled poetry at night; Wallace Stevens’ poems thrust into a desk drawer at the Hartford Insurance Co. for decades; William Carlos Williams, the doctor-poet, composing verse bursts in his car at a stoplight; Virgil Thomson, the music critic and composer; and Man Ray, fashion photographer by day, Surrealist subversive by night. Creativity is a blessing but not enough to pay the rent; and thus, the American work ethic engages with a vengeance.

Edward Steichen was a man seized by his art, so that the lines between work and life blurred from the moment he picked up a camera. Penelope Niven and Patricia Johnston understand this, and their books dovetail seamlessly, providing a completely rounded view of Steichen the artist and journeyman.

Niven provides an exhaustive, oftentimes excessively meticulous, yet ultimately reverent year-by-year account of his life and, to her credit, she provides the necessary pointed disclaimer in her preface. She is, after all, the biographer of Carl Sandburg, Steichen’s brother-in-law, and warns that “Steichen” is “not [an] extended criticism of Steichen’s work . . . being the first to recognize that I am unqualified to do that. It is context, not criticism, that this biography provides.”

Johnston, on the other hand, takes a different angle of vision on her subject. An associate professor of art history at Salem State College, she zeros in on the most fascinating segments of Steichen’s long career, his stint as an aerial photographer during World War I, followed by 20 years as the most successful photographer in the advertising industry. At first glance, one assumes this to be the less-penetrable of the two books. And yet, aside from a few hard-slogging meanderings into feminist and structuralist ideology, Johnston’s study is downright gripping, an unexpected page-turner filled with treats for the eye.

Born in Luxembourg in 1879, Steichen grew up in the heartland, the son of industrious, God-fearing parents who made work a virtue. His mother, Mary, was a skilled seamstress and hat maker; his father, Peter, an obsessive gardener. From his teens, Steichen manifested the best of them both. During business hours, in downtown Milwaukee, he apprenticed at a commercial lithography firm. At twilight and on weekends, the romantic in him emerged, and Steichen wandered for hours through sylvan glades outside Milwaukee, taking pictures in silence of slender trees and still waters in the soft-focus, evanescent, dreamy style that came to characterize his formative “pictorialist” aesthetic.

During obligatory years in Paris at the turn of the century, Steichen studied briefly at the Academie Julian and lived on the Boulevard Montparnasse in the heart of the City of Light’s artistic quarter. He met Rodin and photographed him posed prepossessingly before his statue “The Thinker.” Steichen returned many times over the coming decade to meet and talk with his larger-than-life mentor (“Cher Mai^tre,” the young man called him, the sculptor who embraced sensuality with every breath).

Back in New York, Steichen opened a photographic studio, 291 Gallery, named for its address of 291 Fifth Avenue, and in 1905 joined forces with another mentor and influence, Alfred Stieglitz, the visionary elder statesman of modern American art, to promote their “Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession,” thereby signaling the spirit of independence from the strictures of the academy. Steichen moved back to Europe, to become Stieglitz’s one-man feeder system, sending news and examples of the latest art and photography throughout the boom years at the dawn of the modernist movement, and 291 Gallery expanded beyond photography, to become the place to be, as well as the place to buy, thanks to Stieglitz’s charisma and hypnotic salesmanship.

Steichen’s career move during the Great War mirrored the greater shift in sensibility which metamorphosed photography away from its blurred, indeterminate identity relative to painting--at times, thanks to relentless hammering by the critics, seeming to be little more than the poor, derivative, lesser child of that revered art form. Photography was born in the 1840s as a mimic of nature, a technological way to paint with light, manipulating chemicals and different kinds of treated, impregnated papers in the same way that colors were melded on the palette.

Just as the Impressionists, then Picasso and Braque, wrenched painting free of existing tradition as a solely mimetic translation of the surrounding world, pushing their medium into a realm of perception where it could be understood only with reference to its own terms, so too did the camera “pictorialists” move forward their proprietary desire “to make photographs that look like photographs.” If photography was going to be accepted as an art, and also as Art (with a capital A), it would need to formulate its own visual vocabulary.

Niven and Johnston correctly recognize Steichen’s volunteering in the armed forces at 38 as, on the one hand, a surge of patriotic desire to defend the terrain of beloved France and a practical way to continue to support his wife, two children and aging parents and, on the other, as the artist himself admitted, the fulfillment of a long-held dream of being “a photographic reporter” committed to replicating the “truth” that only the immediacy of his medium could provide. As chief of the photographic section of the U.S. Air Service, Steichen launched the first aerial photographic reconnaissance operation in U.S. military history.

He became a tireless advocate for the “power” of aerial photography because of its “documentary value.” Forty years later, Johnston points out, it was even more evident that Steichen’s stint in the military had buttressed his faith in the role of the photograph “as a historical document, from the very instant it is completed, the very instant the button has been pressed on the camera.”

By the time they begin to write of Steichen’s inter-war years, Niven’s contextual argument and Johnston’s aesthetic lineage have been sharply established. While American culture was becoming corporatized, the practice of “pure” art likewise continued its inexorable drift away from the center of daily life and toward the margins. A survey of mass-circulation magazines revealed that toward the mid-1920s, photographs were used with twice as much frequency as line drawings in commercial print advertising. And so, Steichen (“under economic pressure,” as Johnston indicates), who still had to face the fact that he needed to make a living, went to work for J. Walter Thompson, N.W. Ayer & Son and Young and Rubicam, where his big corporate accounts paraded along like a nostalgic litany of all-American consumer brand names in their heyday: Jergens lotion, Gossard corsets, Pond’s lotion, Welch’s juice, Simmons mattresses, Fleischmann’s yeast, Cutex nail polish, Lux soap, Gotham silverware, Scott tissues, Eastman Kodak film--and on and on.

“If there ever was a poor harassed artist more so than Michelangelo, I have never heard of him,” Steichen provocatively declared at a meeting of art directors and account executives at J. Walter Thompson. “He was thrown up on this kind of work and never being able to do what he thought he wanted to do himself. I am inclined to be grateful that he did not get the chance.”

Both authors take pains to reassure the reader that this was not a simple black-and-white matter of Steichen, fine-artist-turned-applied-artist, “selling out” and seduced by the allure of corporate America. Once we start to examine the magnificent array of work Steichen performed during this most productive period of his life, we have no choice but to agree. Steichen shared this advertising metier with Adolphe de Meyer, Lewis Hine, Charles Sheeler and Ray, among many others. Departing from these other photographer colleagues, however, Steichen was the most outspoken and overtly populist in motivation. He wanted to reach the widest possible public with his work, regardless of subject matter, and had no qualms or snobbism about it.

Steichen’s photographs of smiling, upscale women engaged in various levels of dignified domesticity--cradling babies, laying out dishes, gazing at themselves bare-shouldered in dressing-room mirrors, running a brush through luxuriant locks of hair--exude an irresistible worship of beauty and an appreciation for the female form, assiduously built up by Steichen the art director, at direct odds with the pushy paragraphs and blaring headlines provided by the copywriter.

Over the distance of half a century, the pages of Vanity Fair, Harper’s Bazaar, Ladies’ Home Journal and House and Garden gleam and glow with his work, and the debate about the artfulness of photography seems irrelevant.