Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1906 (Heft 13))

Meanwhile, however, after the lapse of four hundred years, the Oriental
idea has revolved round to us again; this time not as an inheritance, but as
a discovery. The influence that aforetime entered Europe by way of
Byzantium has reached us this time from the opposite end of Asia_from
Japan. It began to trickle westward sixty years ago; and to-day it is
fashionable to admire Japanese art, and, in the light of it , that of China,
whence it was derived. But is the lesson of it at all clearly understood? Has
it yet made any general impression on Western painting? Is there any
reason why it should?
Well, I doubt if any thoughtful person will deny that modern painting
is in need of being revitaiized from some source. Notto be renewed is to
become by degrees moribund and finally to die; and out of its own traditions
and ideals Western painting has pretty well reached the limit of vitalizing
possibilities. For well on to a hundred years it has been living wholly on
the sustenance that it has drawn from its own past; making new shows of
life by diligent inbreeding, but showing less and less capacity to procreate.
The only new birth it has consummated, if indeed it be a new one, is a closer
observance of the laws of light; yet this at best is not a fundamental
principle but a phase of technical motive. It is the final spasm of novelty
in that long worship of the external appearances of the world which has
been through centuries the principle of Western painting. It is a well-
sounding one, let us admit. Light! Light! After long evolving, painting has
at last reached the light! But what next? It might be good if the light
should prove strong enough to cast to the ground and blind, as a certain
light did Saul of Tarsus, if so be that recovery of sight might be
accompanied by a new mind.
For it is a new mind that is needed, if the vitalizing of painting is to be
renewed; a new point of view, a new raison d'être, a new fundamental
principle. Our old one of the supreme importance of matter is about
exhausted; the physical perfections and imperfections of the human figure
have yielded their maximum of motive; so, too, the externals of things of
man’s invention from architecture to bric-à-brac and those of inanimate
nature. Notwithstanding its inexhaustible variety, the theme of appearances
is pretty well worked out, a many times told tale, of interest mainly now for
the manner of its telling, not for the matter told. If painting is to maintain
a hold upon the intelligence and imagination, as music does, and possibly
poetry, and to grow forward in touch with the growing needs of humanity,
it must find some fundamental motive other than the appearances of the
world. Music dives below the surface and lifts man up from the level of
things visibly ascertained, buoying his spirit up toward that height in which
assurance passes into conjecture. Poetry has done, and may continue to do
likewise. But our painting, cluttered with the obvious — the surface appear-
ance or superficial sentiment—is by comparison a childish art, intellectually
and spiritually unimpressive, bourgeoise. If it is to keep itself in living
competition with the superior impressiveness of modern music—modern
poetry, being questionably convicted of a " slump,” may be left to settle its