Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1907 (Heft 19))

NATURE OR THE MIRROR.

NOTHING better calculated to illustrate the unfruitful reiteration
and dull inanity of art when reduced to academic formulas could
well have been devised than the eighty-second annual exhibition
of the National Academy of Design. With the bare exception
of some twenty odd canvases we do not remember ever having been so im-
pressed with the utter futility of paint to express anything. And this is the art
that demands acceptance on the plea that it is holding the mirror up to nature !
Can it be that contemporary life is really so poverty-stricken, the men and
women of to-day so wholly devoid of charm, of all grace and nobility, as a
study of this exhibition would indicate ? One is very loath to believe it.
And a step out into the open confirms one’s faith. A look at the people
passing by, and one feels the tingle of reality, in comparison with which most
of the canvases in this exhibition, and in all academic exhibitions for that
matter, seem tame counterfeits of a pageant long since passed. Nature is
no longer reflected truthfully in the work of these dabblers in pretty trifles.
They have long since befogged and polluted with the breath of ancient pre-
judices and musty ideals the mirror given them in trust, and to-day they
would have us believe that nature is only right as reflected in this mirror
with which they obscure the vision of people. To them this mirror is the
thing, and nature takes a back seat for the moment.
About one life is teeming with interest — throbbing, pulsating with an
almost electric energy that begets great enterprises and carries them to a
successful issue. The very air is astir with big things, and on every hand
lurk great subjects for the man possessed of the least spark of imagination.
But the men whom we have every right to expect should be the interpreters
of this virile, varied, and multicolored life, side-step as though afraid of
being besmirched or knocked over the head by it. It is too brutal ! For
them the great drama of life, daily enacted before their very eyes in a city
populated by a larger number of types than can well be found in any other
place in the world, has no appeal. The poetry, the romance, the tragedy of
all this stirring life, seemed to have escaped their notice entirely.
By day and by night, at early morn, and in the dim twilight hour,
Beauty shyly waits to be courted. She hovers, ready to be caught, everywhere.
But the great Lover, possessed of the understanding heart and the seeing
eye, able to discern the loveliness in these half-veiled, wondrous eyes of
Nature, has a difficult time gaining admission into the company of the elect.
One can hear these gentlemen asking among themselves : “ What does he
take us for—a Rabelais, a Rembrandt, a Balzac, or a Frans Hals, that we
should find epic grandeur in all this squalor?” And why not? Is it asking
too much of the artist that he reflect and interpret the life about him, that
he have a message for his time ? It is expected of the writer, why not of
the painter and the sculptor? Millet and Meunier succeeded in the task ;
why not we ? But it will not be done by imitating the Barbizon men nor by
casting the familiar figures of daily life in the heroic mould of the great Belgian.
Imitation may be the sincerest flattery, but it is also the rankest
hypocrisy and the most soul-deadening thing a man can do. The only
tribute of any value that one can safely pay a strong man is to emulate that
quality in him which made him be wholly true to himself, that one may the
better arrive at a realization of one's own personality. This subtle, evasive
and wholly undefinable something called personality is the only thing of any