Camera Work 32 (1910-10)

CAMERA WORK A PHOTOGRAPHIC QUARTERLY EDITED AND PUBLISHED BY ALFRED STIEGLITZ NEW YORK. NUMBER XXXII MDCCCCX [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk]

[pgbrk] CAMERA WORK: An illustrated quarterly magazine devoted to Photography and to the activities of the Photo-Secession. Published and edited by Alfred Stieglitz. Associate Editors: Joseph T. Keiley, Dallett Fuguet, J. B. Kerfoot, Paul B. Haviland. Subscription price Six Dollars and Fifty Cents (this includes fee for registering and special packing) per year; foreign postage, Fifty Cents extra. All subscriptions begin with current number. Back numbers sold only at single-copy price and upward. Price for single copy of this number at present, Three Dollars. The right to increase the price of subscription without notice is reserved. All copies are mailed at the risk of the subscriber; positively no duplicates. The management binds itself to no stated size or fixed number of illustrations, though subscribers may feel assured of receiving the full equivalent of their subscription. Address all communications and remittances to Alfred Stieglitz, 1111 Madison Avenue, New York, U. S. A. The Craig Annan photogravures in this number by T. & R. Annan & Sons, Glasgow; the other photogravures by the Manhattan Photogravure Company, New York. Arranged and printed at the printinghouse of Rogers & Company, New York. Entered as second-class matter December 23, 1902, at the post-office at New York, N.Y., under the act of Congress of March 3, 1879. This issue, No. 32, is dated October, 1910. [pgbrk]

[pgbrk] PLATES J. CRAIG ANNAN I. East & West II. Man Sketching III. Harlech Castle IV. Bolney Backwater V. The White House [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk]

[pgbrk] PURITANISM, ITS GRANDEUR AND SHAME IT WAS Karl Larsen, a young Danish writer, who made the strange quotidian remark that “ every person over thirty who still believes in an ism is deficient in mental calculation, and logical analysis.” It is one of those brilliant, explosive formulae of absolute individualism, that contain more fascination than exactness. Of course, the desultory creeds of anarchism, socialism, single tax, theosophy, Hinduism, Christian Science, and all the various new thoughtisms—harmless, futile dreams of rejuvenating and reconstructing society-—do not afford opportunities to the boldest and freest use of reason. They furnish profitable meditations to the mediocre mind, as they represent an ideal, or rather a dogma, for the ordinary demonstrations of the human intellect. Their adherents can thunder to their hearts’ content against traditions and conventional authorities and feel elated in expounding opinions of “infinite wisdom.” Absolutely free is only the original thinker with an exceptional, far-seeing philosophy who speculates solely on the basis of personal observation and deduction therefrom; and I doubt that even he could escape the influences of contemporary thought, and if he were an American, evade the tyranny of puritanism. Puritanism is no longer a creed, it has deteriorated into an “existing condition,” yet despite its inability to make new converts it has lost little of its domineering strength, inasmuch as its doctrine has become ingrained in most of us, no matter how much we may at one time or another have opposed its baneful influences. We may rail against Puritanism in bitter denunciations but its tentacles, octopus like, have entangled our very customs and manners. We may laugh at its tyranny, but cannot prevent it from introducing itself into our opinions and modes of life and from curtailing our pleasures and predilections in matters of taste. What monsters of intolerance and fanaticism the old Puritans must have been. I believe St. Gaudens was too much of a Puritan himself to have revealed to us in his statue (at the City Hall Square, Philadelphia) the true significance of their harsh principles of Christian gravity and zeal. There was a chance for epic proportions. He shows us merely a stern attitude and the externals of a simple homespun garb and heavy drooping mantle. His Puritan stalks along sadly and solemnly, with staring eyes that are indifferent to visible things. It is sombre and historically accurate, but it lacks the symbolical, illuminative quality. Imagine what a Rodin could have made of it if he had treated it like his Balzac, like an idea shimmering through matter. He would have shown us the skeleton in the family closet, which saps the best life blood of our nation and makes it impossible to literature and art to expand in a free and wholesome manner. In the life of the Puritans all worship of the beautiful was wanting. The natural expression of the heart’s emotions was proscribed. Amusement was considered vice. They condemned every pleasure, even out-of-door festivals. They advocated a joyous superiority to sensual life. The external and natural man was crushed, only the inner and spiritual man survived. If heaven means 17 [pgbrk] to be blind to palpable facts, the “stains of experience," and the seduction of the senses, they very nearly established the kingdom of heaven upon earth. And yet from the viewpoint of impartiality we cannot help admiring some traits of their theory of life. No doubt we would not particularly enjoy to sit at the same table with Rev. Mather or Jonathan Edwards. They would prove exceedingly dry and obstinate reasoners, pulling up our souls and their own to see how the roots are spreading, and permit us no reference to diffident kisses, yellow moons, and windblown hair. Nevertheless we might feel something akin to sympathy for their manly vigor, their austerity of purpose and preciseness of action. The truth of this is brought home to me whenever I make an excursion to the New England States. I merely have to look at the faces of the passersby as I wend my way through the quaint towns of Newport or Gloucester. In the larger cities all faces seem to resemble each other. They only express energy and eagerness. The desire to better their material welfare seems to have blotted out and wiped away all finer traits of facial construction. In a New England village nearly every face has a distinct physiognomy, its angular features reveal breed, character, independence, a distinct type and individuality. This is refreshing but scarcely profitable to the artist, as their owners have inherited the shortcomings of their forefathers, and despite an increase in worldly culture and milder maxims of conduct, are still very practical and prosaic and affect to be moral at any cost. The New England conscience, morbid and oversensitive, yet inexhaustible in patience and sacrifice, still troubles them. Vows of chastity and corporeal penance have gone out of use. The singing of psalms, family prayers and religious exercises have retreated to their proper place in church and homes. But alas, the hand of God and the claw of the devil are still upon us. The menaces of the prophets, the pitiless doctrine of Calvin, still seem to linger in the air and work havoc in our midst. Half of our difficulties in public and private life are due to the puritanic spirit. And the former belief of predestination to eternal damnation has changed into a rigid sense of propriety that is prohibitive, dismal, and destructive to art and all higher intellectual pursuits. There is no happy beauty, no warmth, music, color in our art, no splendid flashes, no stormy splendor, no indignation, and no revolt. It is the old fight of reason against imagination. Art is dominated by decency, propriety, regularity. The Sunday laws and all the other prohibitive measures have made cowards of us all. In sculpture we only meet with frock-coated and well-booted men. In painting, scarcely a breath of the great passions is palpable. In literature there is much pretense, but no deep thought and lofty imagination, and no trace of realistic truth. The painter does not dare to paint a nude. The writer is afraid of writing a realistic love story. The artist as well as the public bear the troubled conscience of sinners. The slightest trespass may scandalize the taste of the drawing room and forfeit success. Puritanism still deals out banishment, confiscation, punishment to unfettered poetic souls. The nude has no place in the home, but is relegated to the bar room for the grati- 18 [pgbrk] fication of lewd sensations. It is the insincere modesty of the fig leaf. The hypocrisy of a dyspeptic generation of pedants. In the evolution of our race, puritanism is performing miracles. It disciplines immigration. Its methods are rude and perfunctory, but combative and self-assertive and help to smooth down the solicitations and contradictions of new surroundings. Morality is the pretext. Graft the real modus operandi, and material improvement the offered recompense. Our immigrants, unable to form any personal or precise opinions about public functions, are forced into the yoke. It overbalances the whole combination of their vague principles, blind emotions and foreign customs. No solitary man and community can oppose the professional politician and his mediocre and selfish version of puritanism. It is no longer plain and homespun verity which guides our municipal affairs, which is enthroned on editorial chairs, and which is heard from the pulpit and judiciary bench. We are too remote from the A-B-C’s of puritanism to have preserved the grandeur of strange theological dreams, groping reflection, and contemplation of human destiny. We are haunted merely with a phantom of the past out of which all beautiful meaning has faded. All we possess in the domain of higher esthetics is the art of delicate transitions, of refinement, freshness of immediate observation and mechanical skill. And there can be no vital art of any sort until there has grown up an appreciation of the Rubens-Goya spirit; until we dare face our passions, until we are unashamed to be what we are, until we are frank enough to let wholesome egotism have its sway. Human nature is above all the artifices of law, of moral and legal constraint. The number of young artists may be on the increase who ponder over these incongruities, as they labor in the silence of their studios, and darkly and passionately their brain may work. This may be the inauguration of free art expression, but little as yet has struggled to the surface. And as long as we—as Heine said of the Berliners—sit in snow up to our navels, and torment ourselves with conscientious scruples we will have no candor, no fire and dash in any intellectual act. We will remain a grey race, our passions will be cold, and a petty and pallid taste will pervade our world of art and letters. S. H. 19

[pgbrk] A FABLE OF THE FUTURE MANY years ago, I have been told, there was a Great Divide. How it had grown up no one could precisely say, but tradition related there had been a time when it was not and that the people whom it now separated were of the same race. However, they had become known by different names, the Laymen dwelling on one side, the Artmen on the other. The Laymen, working in the shadow of the Great Divide, looked up at the sky; and the Artmen, working on the sunny side of the barrier, looked up also to the sky. Both thought their sky the only one and exclusively their own. To both of them also the ridge of the Great Divide which they saw against the sky seemed to be the Top of the World, and, being restless folk, both strove to reach it, in order that from its height they might control the World. Now, life on the darker side of the Great Divide was very strenuous, demanding brawn as well as brain to surmount the natural obstacles which encumbered the valley and the mountain’s side. But, by dint of endurance, skilful invention of contrivances and, most of all, by combination of effort, the Laymen were making the rough places smooth, and gradually building their way up to the Top of the World, though the top and the sky above it were often hidden from view by the smoke from their furnaces and the mist of sweat given off from their laboring bodies. Meanwhile, among the Artmen, dwelling on the sunny side of the Great Divide, were some who lingered in the valley, dallying in the graveyard of their dead, a spot redolent of lovely memories and beautified with slowly decaying memorials of the greatness of the Past. Yet a larger number, the younger and more alive, were also building for themselves a road that led to the Top of the World, working in their way as hard as the Laymen, yet all the while rejoicing in the perpetual presence of their sky. So matters proceeded. For how long the Fable does not say. But in the fulness of time there came a day, when the roads on either side of the Great Divide were completed and the Laymen and the Artmen met at the Top of the World. It proved to be a vast plateau, so vast that it seemed to be the Whole World. The only thing vaster was the sky; for the sky of the Laymen and the sky of the Artmen were now discovered, not to be two skies, but differing aspects of the one sky. And in the light of this sky, the Laymen and the Artmen rediscovered that they were brothers and lived happily ever afterwards; or at least as reasonably happy as the differences of individuals permitted. Charles H. Caffin. 20

[pgbrk] PHOTOGRAPHY AS A MEANS OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION Early last spring Mr. J. Craig Annan delivered an address on “Photography as a Means of Artistic Expression” to the Edinburgh Photographic Society. In the Society’s Transactions a part of the address was published with the introduction: “The following is an abridgment of the paper, a considerable part of which has unfortunately to be left unprinted as its interest largely depends on the illustrations which cannot be reproduced here.” We wrote to Mr. Annan that we were desirous of publishing his address in full in Camera Work as we felt that whatever he might have had to say on photography was worth while preserving. Mr. Annan wrote us: “It was not really a lecture at all but rather an exhibition of lantern slides chiefly taken from the reproductions in Camera Work. As I am not a fluent speaker I jotted down what was printed to serve as an introduction. I am sorry that there is no more of it and on reading it over I don’t see how I can make a complete article of it. If you find the opinions expressed useful snip them out—I think they would be most effective that way.” We consider it in the best interest of photography to reprint the paper as it appeared in the Transactions of the Society, Vol. XX, No. 267, June, 1910.—The Editors. THE question as to whether photography is entitled to be considered one of the fine arts is, to my mind, a foolish one, but if it were asked whether photography might be utilized as a medium of artistic expression I would most unhesitatingly reply in the affirmative. It might be discussed whether sculpture, or painting, or architecture offered the widest scope for the expression of abstract beauty but it would be admitted by all that each of these arts is peculiarly adapted for the expression of some particular aesthetic quality. Following this line of argument, I hope to be able to prove that photography is capable of expressing certain aesthetic emotions very completely. That its sphere is strictly limited I am quite prepared to admit, but I consider that it is still too young an art to have its scope determined. It has not yet had an opportunity of showing what it may accomplish, largely because it has been practiced by the wrong class of persons. In its early days it was taken up as a hobby by those of a scientific turn of mind, who found in the process a pleasant outlet for the exercise of their chemical and physical knowledge, with the added charm that, as a result of their operations, they obtained pictures. It is not surprising that the accredited artists looked askance at these performances, and without very much consideration concluded that the process, being mechanical, was only capable of producing mechanical results. They reasoned that only by the medium of the human hand could the divine element of imagination be introduced into a picture, but, as a side light on the probable correctness of their conclusions, I may remind you that many of the same class were absolutely assured that Whistler was an impertinent charlatan. Times have changed, however, and the present generation is producing a new type of intelligence, which combines a cultured artistic sense 21 [pgbrk] with a capacity for chemical manipulation, with the result that there is gradually being evolved a new art craft which is called pictorial photography. That the progress of the movement is comparatively slow is not surprising when one considers that so far the productions of the movement have not achieved any commercial status, and consequently few men of genius have been willing to apply themselves seriously to an art which promises so little in return for their efforts. I make no complaint on this score. One cannot expect the patron to anticipate the performance. The difficulties in the path of the would-be patron are obvious. By photography it is so easy to make a picture distinctly resembling a fine thing, and so comparatively easy to produce duplicate copies, that collectors are to be excused if they are chary in venturing into this new sphere of work. At the same time, I am convinced that we will never know the possibilities of pictorial photography until the reward of success is sufficient to attract the highest artistic talent into the arena of effort. But even from the first there have not been wanting prophets who had the clearness of vision to see the possibilities of the new methods and the capacity to prove with considerable fulness the faith that was in them. The greatest of these, I am proud to say, was our fellow countryman, David Octavius Hill, R.S.A., who spent three of the best years of his life in making a noble series of photographic portraits in a studio on the Calton Hill, Edinburgh. During the years 1843-4-5 he was so much engrossed in his photographic work that he scarcely put brush to canvas, but at the end of that period financial considerations compelled his return to his work as a painter. It is an interesting commentary on the comparative appreciation of his two methods of artistic expression that, whereas he is rarely remembered even by the members of the Academy of which he was for many years the honored secretary, there is no civilized country where his name is not revered by all students of pictorial photography as the first great executant of the craft. I will now have much pleasure in submitting to you some of his portraits upon the screen, and I think you will agree with me that he possessed in great measure the power of seeing grandly. His compositions are of the noble order which only a great mind can conceive, and what is of special interest to us at present is that he found his medium capable of expressing his noble thoughts. In a lantern slide it is only possible to exhibit certain qualities, such as the composition of line, the disposition of the masses, and the arrangement of the light and shade. Hill had not at his command the beautiful printing methods which are now available, though still rarely utilized, but, I ask your attention to the fine qualities which his prints exhibit, and, indeed, in the whole of my address I ask you to consider the possibilities which are suggested in the pictures I shall show you, more than the actual results which have so far been achieved. To my mind the art or craft is still in its infancy. Hill’s work proves that it had a healthy birth. It has had but indifferent foster mothers but I think it is now emerging into a vigorous youth, especially among a small group of our transatlantic brethren, and I sincerely believe it has before it a virile manhood. I believe the influence of Whistler to have been the most potent cause of its recent development, and in this connection I have pleasure in 22 [pgbrk] showing you the only writing of the master on the subject—I took the liberty of presenting him with a few reproductions of Hill’s portraits and you can read on the screen his reply:

110 Rue du Bac, Paris. Dear Sir, How very kind and nice of you to send me those most curiously attractive photographs—I should more simply say pictures, for they certainly are pictures, and very fine ones, too. Pray accept my best thanks for your present, and for the flattering thought that prompted it. Very faithfully yours, J. M’Neill Whistler. May 26th, 1893.

I have referred to the imagination as being the chief factor in the equipment of the pictorial photographer, and you may ask what part imagination can play in a mechanical process. It appears to me that there are two kinds of aesthetic imagination: One which evolves a scheme of beauty from the inner consciousness and expresses itself in color schemes and compositions based upon, although sometimes distantly, the appearance of natural objects;— and one which enables its possessor to observe the perfect schemes which nature occasionally provides, and which are capable of realization by means of apparatus and processes. The point I wish to emphasize is, that to produce the best possible work of art in photography it is essential that the worker should have artistic abilities of the highest order, or in other words a photographic picture cannot be of a higher order than the intelligence of the photographer. The art of etching had a Rembrandt to exploit it in its early days, and I am convinced that the position of photography as a vehicle of artistic expression cannot be determined until it has been seriously practiced by a master. Meantime, if I cannot show you the work of an absolute master, I hope to be able to show you in the series of slides which I have prepared, that something has already been accomplished. The first is a self-portrait by Eduard Steichen, and the slide is a reproduction of what is termed a gum print. The peculiar quality of a gum print is that at one stage of the process of production the print is in a soft state, somewhat analogous to a recently painted oil picture, and while it is in this state liberties may be taken with it by rubbing off portions of the semi-fluid picture. This process has been a very popular one with many workers during the last few years, owing to the facility which it affords to alter unsatisfactory details, but it is a method which is only safe in exceptionally competent hands, and I regret to say that many of its present-day votaries cannot be so characterized. Interesting as these gum prints may be, I am rather inclined to believe that the most perfect work has been and will be done in pure photography, for the reason that by pure photography one may reproduce objects, with all their contours, tones, and modelling, with absolute fidelity. It follows 23 [pgbrk] that, if the photographer has the power to see the exquisitely beautiful in nature and is master of the technique of his craft, he has the power to reproduce on surfaces those qualities of form and tone in a more perfect way than is possible by any other method; but as soon as the hand is permitted to interfere in any way with the photograph, the automatic perfection is destroyed and the resulting hybrid picture must rely upon other qualities to justify its existence. OLD COLONIAL ROOMS OLD Colonial rooms! How I like to wander about them and explore their hidden treasures. The dim atmosphere invites to dreams. Age has woven a veil of poesy into nooks and corners, and the dusky silence speaks of another, gentler epoch of human activity. With every year these old tranquil homesteads, with entrance porches and dormer windows, Greek columns, entablatures and angles of quoins, become scarcer. Pick-axe and trowel, and irreverence, are the arms which destroy and scatter these relics. Museums and the homes of speculators, manufacturers and the newly chosen of fortune shelter the rare possessions. They have grown old indeed, those white salons that were once flooded with candlelight. The gold of the ornaments has crumbled. Dust covers the mantlepiece and mouldings. The woodwork has been gnawed by mice. Spiders weave their webs in the broken panes of the leaded glass work. There hang still in discolored frames old dark portraits, whose eyes follow us as we move about the rooms. We love them a little as if they were real personages. We cannot hear their voices but we revive in their presence old legendary tales and entertain the vague desire to mingle with their unknown lives. The old clock on the stairway ticks out the old fable of fugitive hours; and worn-out mirrors, whose blurred surfaces no longer reflect our lineaments, resemble some stagnant pool dead to all those gay and festive scenes of distinguished ladies in high-waisted gowns, and chatting cavaliers in periwigs and swords—that once they gazed upon. (I still seem to hear the musicians play on yonder balcony!) And this piece of furniture trembling with age, may not perchance our hand rest upon it in the same attitude as hands long fallen to dust have done. From every object, from the stately porticoes opening into spacious halls and old chambers, the broad staircases with carved banisters and twisted newels, as well as from every detail of the elegant and elaborate cornices, simple Greek frets, curious stair brackets and consoles, paneled dadoes, dentils and dainty modillions, is wafted the fragrance of another age. Strange that our American painters do not more fully realize the discreet charm that lingers in these rooms for all those who like solitude or dreams. There is much talk about the incongruities of our present surroundings. 24 [pgbrk] Nobody feels this more keenly than the figure painter, who finds it difficult to conjure up an appropriate background for his compositions. Realistic subjects generally find a harmonious background in their own local environment, but it is different with portrait or ideal figure subjects. These do not adjust themselves so easily. They clamor for a simple background that would have a deeper significance, like those of the Old Masters, where a window in a corner, or an archway, reveals some enchanting bit of scenery, characteristic of the country where the painter lived. What is in our country typically American that would lend itself to such purpose ? A machinery hall or a Pullman sleeper! It would hardly prove adequate. In his search the painter is driven out of doors and only too willingly falls into the error of imitating some other period of art, by preference the English school of portrait painters. But their views through columns and curtained drapery on lofty trees and quiet park scenes pervaded by a twilight atmosphere, have nothing in common with the life of our continent. Why not select something that possesses a fine native flavor, something which everybody might understand and appreciate. Is there anything more typical of our American civilization than these simple forms, the exquisite proportions and pure geometrical lines of the Colonial style, which transplanted the severe grace of Palladio’s and Vignola’s superb inventions to our soil ? The Colonial style was not one of the great original ones, but it was judicious and legitimate adaption. Everything had symmetry of plan, and its ornaments rose flowerlike from the natural conditions of material and construction. No showy decorations, no affected forms! The riches that architects have dissipated with prodigal hands on other styles are looked for in vain. Clear, serene and classical, these mansions still imprison within their walls the ghost of former beauty. And it is within the reach of every artist to call the phantom back to life, for the realm in which it lingers, in which everything is silent and grey, possesses that rare harmony which imbues every figure entering it with stately grace. A woman resting her elbow on a mantlepiece, or standing listlessly at the entrance of an alcove, or leaning like some weary caryatid against a pilaster, would offer in those calm attitudes all that beauty can yield in her luckiest moments. The figure becomes steeped, as it were, in remembrance, and has almost nothing of present day reality. Even a nude would lose all its corporeality in such vague environment. It would come to us as from some far-off realm and step into our life as a vague and fanciful vision. The Colonial room is one of the heritages of the past left for our artists to glorify. It is one of the ideal riches of our race. In its graces the more stately needs of the painters’ joy in life could find gratification, as it furnishes by right of tradition and history the most ideal and convincing ‘‘environment” available to the American portrait and ideal figure painter. 25 [pgbrk]

[pgbrk] PLATES HENRI MATISSE I. Photogravure of Drawing II. Photogravure of Drawing FROM THE DRAWINGS EXHIBITED AT THE MATISSE EXHIBITION, PHOTO-SECESSION GALLERY, MARCH, 1910. [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk]

[pgbrk] ART: LIFE’S PRISMATIC GLASS ALL great art conceals artfulness, but never conceals the artist. The mission of genius is to transfix the universal as she peeps through the particular, to waylay the imperceptible. In great art the part always contains the whole. Where there are two persons in contact there is drama. Men of action achieve the obvious; poets achieve the impossible. There is no art without a moral. It is Knowledge defining Will, that is, a sudden flashlight poured suddenly on the dumb, brute thing we call Nature. Art renders the world fabulous, and the fable is the reality. There are obtuse minds, but no obscure thoughts. One should never paint or write with the thought of being understood, but only for those who understand. The world without genius would be like the skull of poor Yorick without Hamlet’s soliloquy. The difference between the poet and the ordinary man is the difference between a piano and a cash register. The poet contains all the melodies that lie in infinite latency, and at a touch outwell the vibrant harmonies. The average man, touch whatsoever key you may, responds baldly, absolutely, like the latest total-adder, and with as much music. All literature is a fishing for words; all thought a fishing for ideas; all labor a fishing for food. Opposed to all this is the attitude of receptivity. I will to be fished out of this dirty pool of a world. The ebbtide leads to the depths. My attractions shall be the bait I shall dart for. There is a beauty that is blasphemous—the wild, savage, sacrilegious beauty of mountain ravines, of dark, desolate wastes. Art is the everlasting protest of man’s soul against this day’s work, this lumpish experience on the earth. Man sides with Lucifer, but he does not know it; he flies in the face of the primal edict, but he never knows the significance of his protest. His religions are a kind of atheism. He repeats mechanically, “God’s will be done,” but he will not stop to find that Will out. Art, pleasure and other-world hankering are his consolations for the ruthless, pitiless exactions of that Will which is always being “done.” The soul’s very gait and bent and attitude as it utters its thoughts to itself —that is, what Maeterlinck has done in his dramas. Maeterlinck in his dramas and essays has said the unsayable; he has put those things into words which the brain never knows and the tongue never utters. His characters are subconscious. He has seen the world as it is, the home of shadows that whisper across chasms. 33 [pgbrk] The instinct of imitation is more quickly aroused at the sight of things evil than at the sight of things good. Atmosphere has a greater power of suggestion than ideas. The subject of a sermon will more surely corrupt the listener than the moral will tend to redeem. That is the reason risque plays and books will always sell no matter whether, as in “l’Assommoir,” the hideous death of a drunkard is depicted, or, as in “Madame Bovary,” the end of the woman libertine is indicated. The suggestion to get drunk assails the reader of “l’Assommoir” in just that degree that the orgies of the Coupeau household are depicted; and the number of women who have found consolation in the escapades of Madame Bovary, women who have settled down for a “ better time” after reading it, is perhaps incalculable. Macbeth has fathered murder. “Ten Nights in a Bar-room” has confirmed thousands of drunkards in their courses. Decadence in art, that excessive passion for detail and finesse, is like the sudden exaltation of the senses just prior to death, when the minute is seen with startling reality. Shakespeare’s plays never made a “bad” man a “good” one. That is Shakespeare’s greatest glory, that he has no moral to inculcate. He has shown us the wonders of sin, the tremendous possibilities in evil and the petty degradations of conscience. He has shown us the way to greatness, the path to the stars, and the hell that surges at the feet of a man who falters in his strong earth-lusts. Be true to your dream of power and sweep to your revenges, he tells us. Weakness is the only sin in sinning. We pity Othello, but stand in awe of Iago—and awe is kin to worship. Music infinitizes the soul of the strong man, while woman enfeebles and finitizes it. Music mirrors the ideal rapture one seeks and which forever flies, and in flying draws the soul with it, transforming it to its own majestic, immeasurable proportions, teasing it, swelling it, with a desire never to be satisfied. Sexual love is the rapture one may satisfy, and a rapture satisfied is a rapture dead. We live by things we do not possess and are slain by the things we do possess. That which we catch catches us, and the thing I have has me. If cosmic creation began by the disturbance of an equilibrium, so does creation in man begin by the disturbance of an equilibrium, an unbalancing; hence the greatest art is never quite a sane art. We conceive in passion—true in the mental as well as in the physical world. This is even true of the critical faculty; it is the passion for destruction at white heat, a cold art to the observer’s eye only. A calm is a passion in suspense, a temporary equilibrium gathering momentum for another tidal wave of destruction—or creation. Benjamin DeCasseres. 34

[pgbrk] PLATE GORDON CRAIG I. Ninth Movement FROM AN ETCHING TO BE EXHIBITED IN THE GORDON CRAIG EXHIBITION AT THE PHOTO-SECESSION GALLERY, DECEMBER, 1910. [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk]

[pgbrk] DECADENCE AND MEDIOCRITY MEDIOCRITY, eternal and omnipotent, passing before Originality, mutters two words: “Decadent” and “morbid,” and then sweeps on in its complacent dulness, feeling sure that it has given birth to a supreme judgment. We are sure that the Candy Kids of art here in New York who expose their vulgarity each Sunday in that Louvre of commonplaces, the Comic Supplement, in their soul of souls believe Manet and Degas, Rops and Geiger, Baudelaire and Mallarmé to be poisonous spittle from the lips of Satan. And the Comic Supplement is the Holy Script of the People here in New York. It is the simper on the face of the Golden Calf. And from the Comic Supplement to the painter with a Vogue is only the length of a stone throw. “A wholesome art,” “a sane art,” “a normal art”— that is, an art that is imitative, an art that is sprung from a poverty of brain and feeling, an art that glorifies its own impotency and plays the paramour to the dollar—they are the American shibboleths. For today artistic and political demagogy go hand in hand and you shall mouth the phrase that cows and be flunkey to Morality—Miss Morality, if you please, with a flat chest, high ideals and a low brow! It was Paul Bourget, I believe, who said, succinctly, that a decadent in art was an individual atom that had revolted from the mass. For in art, as in society, the whole weight of the mass is brought to bear at each moment and at each point to crush the individual who is struggling to emancipate himself from the deadly dulness of group-standards and group-technique. The decadent, the revoke, the man with a new vision, a new way, a finer perception, is always a danger to the community of dullards, to the stratified hierarchy of saintly academicians and embalmed mediocrities. Originality wears the mien of Catalina and brings not peace, but a sword. In this sense the brain that blossoms with the new idea, the new way— the brain of a Rodin, of a Baudelaire, of a Nietzsche—may be called a decadent brain, for it bears with it a principle of disintegration and dissociation. It provokes pain and life, and the new ideas that germinate there strike again and again at the fat face of Complacency. It threatens Routine and Habit with death; it demands a new adjustment. It is a Kill-joy at the banquet of fools and ignoramuses. Morbid and pestilential? Yes! It threatens Stupidity with death and stands like a vision of Annihilation on the steps of the rotting rookeries of academic thought! What mansions they build, these prophets of stale things, these babblers of buckeyes!—all at last blown to atoms when they venture near the arsenal of an original brain with its “morbid” or “decadent” ideas! The ancient gods awake again and again, and there is in art always one who stalks through the world weaving his filaments of beauty into concrete images and ideas; but the cabals of mediocrity are always in session discussing its aureoled cows. The New Dreamer stands there reversing all axioms; but the aureoled cow is immortal. Benjamin De Casseres. 39

[pgbrk] ON THE THRESHOLD AFTER the depression that followed the shock of the beginning of realization and clarification of vision, I was plunged into deep thought —thought that coursed back years upon years; that projected forward eons upon eons; that took the now apart atom by atom; that understood that the past and future were a continuous part of the Eternal Present. I looked at self in the polished black mirror of truth and what I beheld therein made me fear for the moment to think; and when I dared at last with a strange new-born courage, I grew dizzy, sick almost at the vasts that opened to my vision. I found myself alone in the silent, blue-domed desert of thought, a pigmy before the mysterious, voiceless Sphinx—Life—looking into its sublime, impassive face, into the nocturnal star-studded space beyond, knowing for the first time the meaning of the aspirations of the great, blind, struggling force prisoned within my body. And I trembled with terror, even with horror of myself, for I had been treating this great, blind, inscrutable colossus as a playful kitten and letting the hours slip by like so many grains of sand. And I cried aloud “Thou fool” and then fell into silence. Then from the lips of the Sphinx, like deep soothing music came the words : “Peace. Fear not. The Past and Future are the Living Present. The whole outweigheth its parts. Peace, Fear not. Mould flowereth into Beauty. The soul turneth dross to Gold. Peace. Fear not.” A calm came over my spirit for I knew that I had begun to understand and that thereafter so long as my bones were clothed with flesh and sentient with the breath of life, I would no more stumble on my way nor stray from the road that led beyond the Sphinx. Joseph T. Keiley. 40

[pgbrk] PHOTO-SECESSION NOTES THE PHOTO-SECESSION GALLERY THE amount of material which The Secession had on hand last season made it impossible to show all of it. It is our regret that a collection of drawings by Elie Nadelman, of Paris, unexpectedly had to be returned to the artist for an exhibition in Europe without our having been able to place it before the New York public. We hope to get the collection back again at some future time. In the meantime we feel it may interest the readers of Camera Work to read what Mr. Nadelman had prepared for the catalogue which was to explain the character of his work when exhibited in the Little Gallery of the Photo-Secession. Mr. Nadelman wrote: “I am asked to explain my drawings. I will try to do so, although form cannot be described. Modern artists are ignorant of the true forms of art. They copy nature, try to imitate it by any possible means, and their works are photographic reproductions, not works of art. They are works without style and without unity. “It is form in itself, not resemblance to nature, which gives us pleasure in a work of art. “But what is this true form of art ? It is significant and abstract, i.e., composed of geometrical elements. “ Here is how I realize it. I employ no other line than the curve, which possesses freshness and force. I compose these curves so as to bring them in accord or in opposition to one another. In that way I obtain the life of form, i.e., harmony. In that way I intend that the life of the work should come from within itself. The subject of any work of art is for me nothing but a pretext for creating significant form, relations of forms which create a new life that has nothing to do with life in nature, a life from which art is born, and from which spring style and unity. “From significant form comes style, from relations of form, i.e., the necessity of playing one form against another, comes unity. “I leave it to others to judge of the importance of so radical a change in the means used to create a work of art. (Signed) Elie Nadelman.” The exhibition season, 1910-1911, of the Photo-Secession Gallery will open about November fifteenth. The opening exhibition will be a mixed one; it will contain, among other things, lithographs by Cezanne, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec; drawings and oils by Henri Rousseau; and drawings by Rodin. This exhibition will be followed by one of etchings, drawings and wood cuts by Gordon Craig; one of paintings and drawings by Max Weber. An exhibition of water-colors by Picasso, will be held in March. An exhibition of Cezanne water-colors will also be held sometime during the season, but the date is as yet not definite. Besides these exhibitions, several photographic exhibitions are on the calendar. In short, the season of 1910-1911 at “291” promises much of vital interest. 41 [pgbrk] THE EXHIBITION OF PHOTOGRAPHS AT THE ALBRIGHT GALLERY On November second the Albright Gallery will open an exhibition of photographs arranged for it by the Photo-Secession. It will contain five hundred prints. The Foreword of the catalogue will read as follows: “The aim of this exhibition is to sum up the development and progress of photography as a means of pictorial expression. The Invitation Section consists largely of the work of photographers of international reputation, American and foreign, whose work has been the chief factor in bringing photography to the position to which it has now attained. It comprises a number of ‘one-man shows,’ and in many instances these exhibits include a number of prints executed quite recently. The prints in this entire section have been selected because of their intrinsic quality; while many have also the additional interest of marking special stages in its development. Many of these prints could be included only through the kindness of private collectors. In view of the comprehensiveness of this historical survey, the excellence and scope of the work of each individual represented here, and the evidence of the present-day vitality of Pictorial Photography, this exhibition at the Albright Art Gallery aims at something more thorough and definite than has been attempted heretofore in any previous exhibition, either in America or abroad. The Open Section was added to this exhibition to give all American photographers an opportunity of being represented; and such of their work was selected as proved to be of a sufficiently high standard to link it with the spirit and quality of the Invitation Section. Owing to the peculiarities of our Custom-House system, it was impracticable to open this section officially to foreign contributors. Some foreigners, however, submitted their prints on their personal responsibility.” A full report of this important exhibition will be published in the next number of Camera Work. 42

[pgbrk] PLATE CLARENCE H. WHITE I. Alvin Langdon Coburn and His Mother [pgbrk] [pgbrk] [pgbrk]

[pgbrk] OUR ILLUSTRATIONS OUR illustrations in this number comprise five photogravures by Craig Annan from his own photographic negatives ; a photogravure reproduction of a photograph by Clarence H. White ; reproductions of two drawings by Henri Matisse and of an etching by Gordon Craig. Mr. Annan’s photogravures were made by himself from negatives expressly designed for reproduction in this form of printing. The possibilities, both artistic and practical, that were latent in this supple and exquisite process were recognized by him as far back as the early ’90’s, when Alfred Stieglitz was also independently engaged in its trying out. The experiments of both, however, had been anticipated a few years by Dr. P. H. Emerson when he induced Goupil & Co. in Paris to interpret some of his negatives for him in photogravure. The question may occur to some of our readers as to why drawings and etchings should be reproduced in Camera Work. The answer is a very simple one. To begin with, circumstances have gradually converted this magazine into the active and representative organ of the Photo-Secession ; and the Secession has, for several seasons alternated the photographic exhibitions at its Little Galleries with exhibitions of drawings, etchings, water-colors and oils. And the reason for this is also very simple, since it is but the carrying out of one of its own principles, namely: that photography, claiming to be a legitimate medium of personal pictorial expression, should take its place in open review with other mediums in order that its possibilities and limitations might be the more fairly judged. This policy, so far from indicating any lapse in loyalty or diminution of interest toward photography, on the part of either the Secession or of Camera Work, is but the practical test of their greater faith. The three reproductions of non-photographic pictures in this number form a prelude to a forthcoming number in which there will be an important contribution of drawings by Auguste Rodin, reproduced in facsimile, but in a slightly reduced size.—The Editors. 47 [pgbrk] CAMERA WORK NUMBERS ABOUT TO BE ISSUED WITH this number of Camera Work the eighth year of its existence comes to a close and the January issue of 1911 begins a new volume. There are in the course of preparation and nearing completion: RODIN NUMBER, which will include facsimile reproductions in color of several of Rodin’s most beautiful drawings; together with three of the Steichen “Balzac” series of photographs, as well as a new portrait by that photographer. STIEGLITZ NUMBER, will contain a series of recent New York photographs taken by Mr. Alfred Stieglitz. STEICHEN NUMBER, will include reproductions in color of several of Mr. Steichen’s paintings as well as a new series of his photographs. KUEHN NUMBER, will contain about fourteen to fifteen plates by this eminent German-Austrian photographer. BRIGMAN NUMBER, a second series of this gifted photographer’s pictures will be issued in that number. 48

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