Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1905 (Heft 12))

But to come back to our evolution series :—in the present epoch there
appears to be a confusion of art-movements. If we turn to France, we find
the most extraordinary agglomeration of thought. Bastien-Lepage, whose
influence is still greatly felt, strode toward photography: both his results and
the methods of producing them prove that he clearly recognized the direction
nature intended art should take. Chavannes ran toward the savage as fast
as possible; and Raffaelli and Jongkind are to-day doing the same thing.
Claude Monet in one canvas is ultra-photographic; in the next is dominated
by his prehistoric ancestors. The Decadents seem mad, but are really only
lost souls who know not whether they are living to-day, a thousand years
ago, or in some coming century.
The English, of course, stand by themselves and are consistent — in
adhering to the past; we all know that they are literary, as a people, and
their mental make-up and attitude toward art seem to be much the same as
that of the average art-critic already referred to. The lifelong fight Whistler
carried on in London was not merely waged against the English illustrative
tendencies, but also against the literary painting. England, too, is the
home proper of the Buckeye (a slang American term, I believe), which is
psychologically the most interesting of all forms of painting — it is that kind
which the lightning artist in the vaudeville paints in such a marvelously
short time,and which sells in shops for a price smaller than its frame. We hold
it in contempt, but in truth there are very few who are capable of executing
a true Buckeye, which consists of a clever combination of the cave-dwellers'
art with impressionism; it is the savage attitude toward nature masquerading
in clothes of the latest fashion, and it is the incongruity of the combination,
which we instinctively feel, that appeals to our sense of the ridiculous.
The Buckeye is the clown in art.
But to leave England for a moment, let us try to find where art is
marching onward. Italy and Spain seem to be creating little; Holland and
Belgium are mostly under French influence ; Germany, Austria and Russia
are feeling the French wave of impressionism, but are at the same time pro-
ducing much original art—art however, but slightly further evolved than
that of the Venetians. So we have nothing left except America. Now
America, I admit, may not be doing any more—or may even be doing less,
if you choose — than some of the other countries I have slurred over, but
there is one thing about American art that has never been dwelt upon suffi-
ciently by critics. The usual complaint of critics is that we have no national
art, that our productions are not distinctly American, that Whistler, Sargent,
Harrison, etc., as they live in Europe, have ceased to express the American
temperament, and so on. But I claim that not merely do we have a national
art — even if limited in quantity—but that our art shows most marked race-
characteristics, more so than that of any other people; that there is one
distinct note running through all good American work, and that is its non-
literary, non-savage, photographic quality. And consistentlv, American
photography has more of the photographic quality than the European; it
produces its effect without the use of the personal touch, it appeals to the

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