Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 18))

THE EDITORS’ PAGE.

THE exhibition of drawings in black and color by Miss Pamela
Colman Smith, held at the Little Galleries of the Photo-
Secession in January, marked, not a departure from the inten-
tions of the Photo-Secession, but a welcome opportunity of
their manifesting. The Secession Idea is neither the servant
nor the product of a medium. It is a spirit. Let us say it
is the Spirit of the Lamp; the old and discolored, the too
frequently despised, the too often discarded lamp of
honesty; honesty of aim, honesty of self-expression, honesty of revolt against
the autocracy of convention. The Photo-Secession is not the keeper of this
Lamp, but lights it when it may; and when these pictures of Miss Smith’s,
conceived in this spirit and no other, came to us, although they came
unheralded and unexpectant, we but tended the Lamp in tendering them
hospitality. The following estimate of these, written by Mr. James Huneker,
appeared in the New York Sun of January fifteenth:
" Pamela Colman Smith is a young woman with that quality rare in
either sex—imagination. She is exhibiting at the galleries of the Photo-
Secession, 291 Fifth Avenue, a collection of seventy-two drawings, colored
and black and white. There is a Shakespeare series, and illustrations to
Schumann’s'Carnival.' You read the titles and dream of Blake, of Fantin-
Latour, of the Japanese, of De Groux, of James Ensor, of Beardsley, of
Eduard Munch, of Maeterlinck, and of Chopin. But your eyes tell you
that Miss Smith is in every design, many of them mere memoranda of a
spiritual exaltation, of the soul under the influence of music, or haunted by
some sinister imagining. ' Death in the House' is absolutely nerve-shud-
dering. Yet it is not concerned with the familiar symbols of the grewsome.
There is little statement, much suggestion. Munch, himself a master
magician of the terrible, could not have succeeded better in arousing a
profound disquiet, that is at once the play of the nerves and the inner
images of our common destiny. Morbid? Yes, perhaps; but so is Chopin,
so is Schumann morbid. The Schumann set is very effective. To the
lover of this exotic cahier of pianoforte music, miniature poems all, Miss
Smith’sinterpretation of ‘Sphinxes’ will be startling.
" There is in Paris an artist known to the raffinistes, praised by
Huysmans, execrated by the critics, laughed at by the public. His name
is Odilon Redon. He had a special salle at the 1904 Autumn Salon. A
lover of the bizarre, the eccentric, the erotic, the Baudelairian, Redon is a
strangely powerful designer. His painting is black and acid, though his
lithographs are well worth study. Redon could not have transferred from
the key of music to the symbols of design this theme as has Miss Smith.
Her sphinxes are females with rampant croups, tails ending in flowers.
They smile, these mystic beasts, the sardonic smile of them that know the
secrets of all things. They are at once repelling and enticing. ' Spirits of
Pain,' 'The Corse,' ' The Castle of Pain,' ' The Reeds,' reveal the workings


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