Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 10))

EXHIBITION NOTES — THE PHOTO-SECESSION.
VIENNA ÉLITE EXHIBITION.
We had hoped to have published in this number a review of the above
exhibition by a prominent Viennese art-critic, but the expected manuscript
has not yet materialized. Nevertheless, congratulatory letters have reached
us in which the artistic success of the exhibition has been announced and the
Photo-Secession collection highly lauded. Our informants write that the
fifty-one Secession prints as a unit dominated the exhibition and met with
such appreciation that at the opening night six of them—the work of
Messrs. White, Coburn, and Steichen—were purchased for a total of two
hundred and seventy dollars, which in Austrian currency equals 1350
crowns—unheard-of prices in Europe for prints of such small size. The
highest price (eighty dollars) was paid by Baron Alfred von Liebig for
Steichen's“Rodin—Le Penseur.” It is a pity that this particular print
should be lost to America, for it was beyond dispute the most wonderfully
beautiful of any from this now famous negative. We expect to revert to
this exceptional exhibition in our next number, by which time fuller advices
will have reached us.
VIENNA PHOTO-KLUB EXHIBITION
Not satisfied with one exhibition, Vienna will hold another important
one as soon as the Élite has closed its doors. As the choicest Secession
work had been sent to the Elite, the Secession Council would have much
preferred to have abstained from contributing to the Photo-Klub Ex-
hibition. It is always hazardous to one’s reputation to allow comparison to
be drawn between the very choicest and even the choice, but the high
character of the Photo-Klub shows and the appreciation of Secession work
that its authorities have shown in the past entitled them to our aid. A col-
lection of some seventy frames by twenty-eight Secessionists was duly for-
warded and will be before the Viennese public by the time this reaches our
readers. This collection was fully up to Secession standards, but in no way
comparable to the picked prints sent to Dresden and the Élite.
BERLIN.
The drain on the pictorial resources of the Photo-Secession is exhaust-
ing, and the European exhibition authorities seem to think that there is no
end to the photographs which we are supposed to have up our sleeves.
There seems to be an impression abroad that the Secession can furnish col-
lections worthy of its prestige and name at a moment’s notice and to any
desired extent. The Council had barely shipped the second Vienna col-
lection when Berlin cabled a request for an exhibit to be hung at its
“ International ” in the Royal Art Galleries. The Secession is accused of
being a fomenter of strife, and, lest international jealousies be thus aroused,
it was decided to let Berlin have an adequate representation of Secession
work. This exhibition opens simultaneously with the Photo-Klub show in
Vienna.

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