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

Often two bodies interlace each other, flesh crushing upon flesh in all the
exasperation of a futile possession ; and the energy of the embrace is indi-
cated in the great hand that lies like a weight upon the shoulders. It is
hideous, overpowering, and it has the beauty of all supreme energy.
“And these drawings, with their violent simplicity of appeal, have the
distinction of all abstract thought or form. Even in Degas there is a certain
luxury, a possible low appeal, in those heavy and creased bodies bending in
tubs and streaming a sponge over huddled shoulders. But here luxury
becomes geometrical; its axioms are demonstrated algebraically. It is the
unknown X which sprawls, in this spawning entanglement of animal life,
over the damped paper, between these pencil outlines, each done at a stroke,
like a hard, sure stroke of the chisel.
“ For, it must be remembered, these are the drawings of a sculptor,
notes for a sculpture, and thus indicating form as the sculptor sees it, with
more brevity, in simpler outline, than the painter. They speak another
language than the drawings of the painter, searching, as they do, for the
points that catch the light along a line, for the curves that indicate contour
tangibly. In looking at the drawings of a painter, one sees color; here, in
these shorthand notes of a sculptor, one's fingers seem actually to touch
marble.”
As a further record we also reprint what some of the chief art-critics of
the daily press had to say. These are the opinion-formers of the large ma-
jority of the American public. In no other city does this rule apply so
generally as it does in New York, and for that reason the art-critic really
holds a more responsible position there than is usually realized. Is he always
conscious of it?
J. N. Laurvik in the Times:
The exhibitions of drawings by Rodin at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, 291
Fifth Avenue, is of unusual artistic and human interest. It is also a challenge to the prurient
prudery of our puritanism. As one looks at these amazing records of unabashed observations of an
artist, who is also a man, one marvels that this little gallery has not Iong since been raided by the
blind folly that guards our morals.
In these swift, sure, stenographic notes a mastery of expressive drawing is revealed—a sculp-
tor’s mastery—which is seldom beautiful, according to accepted standards of beauty, but that never
fails to be interesting and imbued with vital meaning. They have a separate, individual beauty of
their own—the beauty of all expressive, characteristic things. Here are set down with an all-em-
bracing scrawl the most curious contortions and unlikely postures of the human body. The soft
undulations of the female form are recorded with a few hastening lines that speak eloquently
of life. It is the quintessence of brevity, the essence of art expression that has here been
flashed upon a piece of paper, illuminating unsuspected corners of the genus Man—the procreating
machine.
There is a force elemental and appalling in these simple outlines, that has never before been
presented in art. Life has been surprised and stands shivering, breathless and all absorbed in its
passionate, flesh-crushing embrace. In these mad, glad yearnings of man, the female form is like
an undulating, writhing, sinuous reptile that will not be denied its prey. It squats, toad-like, on
all fours, it sprawls on the ground like the snake on its belly, face forward, arms outstretched with
frog-like digits ; it reveals the rippling, wave-Iike line of its profile as, with arms overhead, it fixes
its hair, and, crouching on hands and knees, it exposes the flat base of the feet and the beautiful,
broad expanse of the back as seen from above.
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