Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1903 (Heft 3))

THE VALUE OF THE APPARENTLY
MEANINGLESS AND INACCURATE.
Accuracy is the bane of art. There is no despotism so ghastly, so
disastrous in its results. Slavery of observation and a too close discrim-
ination of the actualities of life have foisted upon us a David and a Cornelius,
the Düsseldorf and the Hudson River Schools, expressions of art which,
according to the present codes of esthetics, are the very lowest imaginable.
Modern Art has nothing to do with plumb-lines and mechanical props. It
has taught every artist to delight in the report of his own eyes and to set
it forth with all the eloquence he is capable of. His individual eloquence is
generally more important to him than exact likenesses of form and color, and
he would rather fail in conformity to truth than in eloquence. He recog-
nizes that he can only master the general aspect of Truth, and that to copy
nature slavishly is but to invite failure and to join hands with vulgarity.
Modern art, in its best examples, is the very antithesis of accuracy.
Look at a Sargent or Boldini. What an apparent waste of accidental
lights, passing shimmers, speckles, flashes, and other local impossibilities
appear in all their pictures! And yet each of these embellishing touches
lends its value to the variety and comprehensiveness of the total effect.
As unimportant as these technical details may seem at the first glance,
they are really the leading characteristics of modern art, for they lend virility
to lines and masses. With their help the immobile becomes animated, the
silent begins to speak, and the dull turns colorful.
The art-connoisseur of to-day wants to see subjects bathed in light and
air, and wants an actual atmosphere to be interposed between his eyes and
the representation of figures, flowers, fields, trees, etc.No matter if the
arms and legs of a figure are rightly measured and located, if they only look
like arms and legs he is satisfied.
Alma Tadema and Bouguereau have fallen in esthetic appreciation.
Naturalness of effect in their pictures is invariably sacrificed to pedantic
knowledge of form and line, and their groups of figures look cold, hard, and

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