Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 5))

or shadow, all the hidden beauty bursts to the surface and surprises us
with its fugitive charms. Whistler’s “Yellow Buskin,” “At the Piano,”
“Battersea Bridge,” “The Ocean,” are painted in that way. Could you
imagine his Yellow Buskin Lady in any other way than buttoning her
gloves, glancing back for a last time over her shoulder, as she is walking
away from you into gray distances? That peculiar turn of her body reveals
the quintessence of her beauty. And that is the reason why Whistler has
painted her in that attitude. Thus every object has its moment of supreme
beauty. But in life these moments are as fugitive as the fractions of a
second. Through art alone they can become permanent and a lasting
enjoyment.
¶ The ancient Greek believed in an ideal standard of beauty to which the
whole universe had to conform. The modern artist, on the other hand, sees
beauty only in such moments as are entirely individual to the forms and
conditions of life he desires to portray. And as it pains him that his
conception of beauty will die with him, he becomes an artist through the
very endeavor of preserving at least a few fragments of it for his fellow-men.
With Whistler this conception of beauty was largely a sense for color, the
realization of some dream in black and silvery gray, in pale gold or
greenish blues. Color was to him the island in the desert which he had
to seek, unable to rest until he had found it. He saw life in color visions
and his subjects were merely means to express them. In his “ Lady
Archibald Campbell,” he cared more for the black and gray color than for
the fair sitter. The figure is, so as to speak, invented in the character of
the color arrangement. Whistler once said, he would like best to paint for
an audience that could dispense with the representation of objects and
figures, with all pictorial actualities, and be satisfied solely with the music of
color.
¶ And why should we not profit by his lesson, and learn to look at
pictures as we look at the flush of the evening sky, at a passing cloud, at
the vision of a beautiful woman, or at a white chrysanthemum ?
Sadakichi Hartmann.

CREATION.
From life created doth creation come.
The quick beget the quick; love springs from love.
So art from art renews its vital form;
Passes but does not pass; brings flower and seed,
Then flower again ; changes, but never ends.

Dallett Fuguet.