Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 22))

NEW TENDENCIES IN ART.
IN January last there was held in the National Arts Club an exhibi-
tion of Contemporary Art that promises to become historic. Its
historic significance lies in the little fact that here, for the time
being, the public had an opportunity of seeing a collection of
paintings and sculpture, of prints and photographs, that in a measure
reflected the art movement of our time.
The exhibition was composed almost entirely of work by the leading
artistic rebels of America who have disparagingly or in ignorant admiration
been dubbed “ Impressionists.” In the proper sense of the word that is
just what they are—Impressionists. But perhaps it may be well to define
and limit the meaning of the word, lest these men be confused with the host
of sloppy, aping daubers who use it as a convenient cloak to hide their
incompetency. Impressionism is but an expression of the eternal yearning
of man to reach the truth. The history of the word in its application to art
dates back to the salon of 1866, when Eduard Manet exhibited a landscape,
the title being “ Impression.” Manet and Pissaro, who likewise used the
system of divided tones to obtain the effect of real life, were promptly
labelled “ Impressionists ” by the Parisians. The term was one of derision,
but it has remained to justify itself. To-day it is a reproach only to those
by whom it was invented. Nevertheless there are “ Impressionists ” and
“ Impressionists.” Manet was an “ Impressionist,” and so was Whistler,
but not owing to any similarity of method, for Whistler’s art was the anti-
thesis of that of Manet, or Monet; but because all these men were in revolt
against the academic system of painting and returned to nature, striving to
give a momentary Impression. This is a little distinction not generally
understood, and many a canvas is classed with the “ Impressionists ” owing to
the method of placing colors, either in juxtaposition or in an apparent care-
lessness. Impressionism has so penetrated into our thought, our culture and
our ethical expression that the very academies are willy-nilly and subconsciously
affected by it—hence the more than ordinary importance of this exhibition
at the National Arts Club, which was, in the main, an exhibition of Im-
pressions.
This little exhibition, which attracted thousands of people to it in the
three weeks that it was open, suggests some reflections. Here, for the first
time in our art history, an attempt was made to show to the American public
in a collective manner the work of a number of men who have been more
or less discussed in the columns of our daily press as rebels of one kind or
another, as men of genius, or decried as charlatans. And here, too, for the
first time in America, pictorial photography was shown on a level with
paintings and etchings. That they held their own and “made good,” so to
speak, was amply proven by the unusual interest these prints aroused, despite
the fact that many mistook them for mezzotints at first glance, only to dis-
cover to their amazement and mortification that these were merely photographs
they had been admiring.