Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903 (Heft 2))

harsh and angular as if cast in iron, crowned by a pale, apocalyptic face, is
seen against a slab of grayish stone, whose monotony is scarcely broken by
a vista of dark, twisted tree-trunks in the upper corners. The face, haggard
as a ghost of Dante’s Inferno, makes one think of stormy tortuous nights,
of sinister shadows trailing obstinately along the ground. It is a picture
barbaric as the clangor of iron chains against each other, the only attempt
of the young painter in the epic field. It presents Steichen at the height of
his ambition; but being a solitary effort, it is difficult to judge the artist’s
individuality solely from this exalted point of view. One can not fully grasp
his intentions, and it is very likely that he is not conscious of them himself.
IN his landscapes he reveals himself much more clearly. He has created a
world of his own, but one based on actual things, translated into dreams.
THE rain still falls in thin, straight lines upon the blurred symphony of
black and gold that glistens and glimmers on the wet pavements of Fifth
Avenue, and there seems to be something analogous in the vertical lines of
Steichen’s landscapes and the gray lines of the rain outside. Nobody has
carried the composition of lines further than Mr. Steichen. All his pictures
are composed in vertical, diagonal, and outer-twisting line-work, but the
lines are not as distinct and scientific as in Chavannes’ or Tryon’s pictures.
They are not outlines, they only serve as accentuation. He endows each
line with a mystic quality, and they run like some strange rune through his
tonal composition. French critics have compared his pictures with musical
compositions, but I beg to differ. To me all his tree-trunks, whether
ethereally thin, repeating their wavering lines in some moon-hazed water,
or crudely massive, towering into some dismal twilight atmosphere, are
purely decorative. In order to be musical, the line-composition has to
serve as outlines for the color-patches which should in turn repeat or
accentuate the motive of the spacing. In Steichen's pictures color is always
subordinate to one tonal value, and the dominating idea is rather the
expression of a single sentiment than the varying subtleties of a musical
theme. To me Steichen is a poet of rare depth and significance, who
expresses his dreams, as does Maeterlinck, by surface decoration, and with
the simplest of images—for instance, a vague vista of some nocturnal
landscape seen through various clusters of branches, or a group of beech-
and birch-trees, whose bark forms a quaint mosaic of horizontal color
suggestions — can add something to our consciousness of life. His lines,
blurred and indistinct as they generally are, are surprisingly eloquent and
rhythmical. They become with him as suggestive as the dividing-line of
some sad woman’s lips, as fragile as some tremulous flower-branch writing
strange hieroglyphics on the pale-blue sky, or as mystic as the visionary
forms which rise in our mind’s eye, as we peer through the prison-bars of
modern life into some nocturnal landscape or twilight atmosphere. The
only fault that I find with his landscapes, as with the majority of his
pictures, is that they are not finished pictures. They are sketches. A
mere suggestion suffices him. It is left to the imagination of the spectator
to carry them out to their full mental realization.
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