Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1906 (Heft 14))

Modern art is temperamental. Men pass the word around as if it
were a cause for congratulation instead of a confession of weakness. For,
pray you, what does it mean ? In a dictionary sense, that art is expressive
of the particular bias of the individual artist. Of course, it cannot fail to be,
so this definition does not advance our knowledge. As a matter of fact, we
know that in actual experience temperamental means that the source as well
as the direction of most modern art is determined by the condition of the
artist's feelings. His mood may be morose to-day and gay to-morrow, and
he will look out of the windows of his eyes to see if nature glooms or dances
to his mood. But it is a world that he looks out on, itself but one of myriad
worlds, yet to him the universe is within his pigmy self. Instead of building
his art upon eternal breadth he rears a tiny pyramid upside down upon his
own atom of matter, and it wobbles to its fall like the feather balanced on
the nose of a circus-clown.
Perhaps he is doing his best, so don’t shoot him; using what he has —
his feelings—and guiltless of what he has not—a mind. His case is rather
one for pity; he is the victim of disease, and a future age will recognize the
fact, as our own has done in the case of the dipsomaniac. Rum-sodden or
sodden with feelings — the charitable philosophy of the future will try to help
them, allowing them, perhaps, a comfortable income from the State as long as
they abstain from intoxication, or, at least, from the exhibition of it in paint.
For just as a speaker, or, for that matter, a writer, too, may be " intoxi-
cated with the exuberance of his own verbosity," so is the temperamental
painter for the most part intoxicated with the exuberance of his own
feelings ; they master him and, instead of merely coloring his work, become
not only the stimulus but the source also of his endeavors. His motive, his
expression, and his very existence as an artist are determined by the con-
dition of his liver. It is symptomatic of an age much addicted to the public
discussion of the stomach that its art should be largely an exploitation of
nervous moodiness.
Considered philosophically, however, it is the last phase of a condition
of art that already shows signs of being moribund. Painters having ex-
hausted every possibility of new growth in the direction of representing
external appearances, are now absorbed in the analysis of their own feelings;
it is a condition that in human pathology points to insanity and death.
To the patient thus afflicted the physician will prescribe that he try
to get out of himself, and in order to do so that he widen his interests.
Only a similar course can set modern painting upon a road to recovery.
Already those men who, like Winslow Homer, are doing something of real
moment, have done so because they either have not been afflicted with the
disease of self-expression or have shaken themselves free of it.
They have found their inspiration in the vastness outside their puny
selves; nature has not been to them a mirror for their own sensations, but an
infinite mystery; they have passed from absorption in the concrete to some
companionship with the Universal and the Abstract.
Charles H. Caffin.

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