Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1904 (Heft 6))

years ago, already made their mark, and yet hardly anybody in this country
is acquainted with their names. No wonder; the painters of New York
do not even know their confrères in Boston and Philadelphia. The ignorance
of our artists on these lines is simply abnormal.
For their excuse it may be said that the conditions to acquire such
knowledge are exceedingly unfavorable. There is an utter lack of oppor-
tunities for the interchange of ideas. We have no salons, no art-centers of
any pretension, and no corps d’esprit among the artists themselves. Every-
body goes his own way , intellectually isolated , and depending largely on the
observations of his student years, which, at the best, consisted but of
approximate and generally discordant generalizations. To these shortcomings
our stagnation of ideas is largely due. Of course, it may be argued that a
truly great mind may be rich enough to draw continually on itself. I doubt
it; because we develop only by forgetting ourselves, by giving ourselves up
to something not ourselves; but even if it were possible, it has one decided
disadvantage in painting. Isolation invariably brings with it a deficiency in
technique. None of our great hermit-painters, like Abbott Thayer, Ryder,
Winslow Homer, Dewing can claim to be master-technicians.
The poet and the artist get their material out of two worlds—the outer
and inner. More important than the outer world is to them the inner, which
includes their individualities, the whole life of their souls; but they have to
forage in both and combine their treasures, or they will never be able to
create those beautiful forms that blend nature and soul in a perfect and
exquisite fashion. All personal progress requires concentration on subjects
outside oneself and one’s sphere, the quest for knowledge in the realms of
music, literature, philosophy, and science and intellectual pleasure and
amusement.
The average artist takes his task too easily. He relies too much on his
natural gifts and temperament. The easy access to galleries and the broad-
cast distribution of reproductions have spoilt him. He is satisfied with
utilizing the laws and methods laid down by others, instead of studying the
principles of construction himself. He has no use for technical exercises, as
practiced by the old masters who worked at their studies as patiently as if they
were meant to be masterpieces in themselves. He does not realize that one
must practice complexity, before that master’stouch is reached that can
include in a phrase or a line the subtle and carefully balanced harmony of a
thousand more or less conflicting parts. Nor does he apprehend that such
training and disciplining is the safest form of self-development, a refining
process of the moral and intellectual nature of men. He is interested only
in surface qualities. All the artists who recently have sounded in their work
the note of the far East prove this assertion to be true. And how could
anything of lasting value be derived from an occasional contemplation of
Japanese art? Whistler succeeded simply because he carried the research
of expression in that direction farther than any other artist. No, sins of
omission are worse than those of commission. No landscape-painter, for in-
stance, would be handicapped by a study of the ten different cloud-formations