Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 23))

Persian bowl or rug, we do not think of them as representing nature or com-
pare them to anything existing in nature. The Chinese dragon does not
appeal to us as the representation of a real animal. We are impressed in all
of these things and we are moved by their imaginative power and by their
beautiful creation of form, design, and color. Photography is not present.
An eminently able student of the arts spending several months in the
Prado, at Madrid, found himself unconsciously comparing the paintings of
Velasquez with the real people that were about the gallery, and he came to
the frank conclusion that wonderful as were the paintings, and skilled and
beautiful their execution, the human beings were in themselves still finer.
Whistler was obviously of such an attitude, but only from a distant
and reservedly exquisite Beau Brummel standpoint; the dainty butterfly
fluttering among the flowers, sipping a little here and there, and combining
it all by his great genius. In his writings and in the titles of his pictures he
was more radical than in the pictures themselves, and in these he makes it
clear that his resentment was not merely directed at the more vulgar forms
of literary painting, like “Breaking Home Ties” and “The Doctor,” but
that he does not approve of pictures and men much more closely allied to
himself. Although there was no decisive spirit of revolution in the make-up
of Whistler, the entitling a picture, a “harmony in blue and gold,” and his
subsequent defence of the title, proclaim at least a disapproval of existing
conditions in art. But beyond this the picture itself is neither an innovation
nor a renaissance; nothing more than a complete and personal expression of
great genius, for the picture is but the actual representation of nature in an
abstract form with a tentative attempt to eliminate such foreign elements as
light and shade and chiaroscuro, and these not frankly or radically, but by
the subterfuge of flattening the effect of light, and by producing a harmony
of color which by its title is proclaimed a harmony of contrast, but which is
actually one of very low-toned color analogy. For Whistler was not a great
colorist to the point of color appealing to him for color's sake. The
resonance and harmony of pure rich color was foreign to him, even to the
point of his resenting it. Just as this refined estheticism kept him from
ever producing anything blatantly ugly in color, so this same faculty limited
him and his palette to a narrow and tone-degraded gamut of color which
was influenced by the generations of established photographic instinct for
representation. It is in his very last work, unfortunately not well known or
much appreciated, that he sounded a more definite challenge to photographic
painting, even though he sounded this challenge through a tiny golden flute.
This work is all a delicate patchwork of color and design, that combines the
qualities of form in the Tanagra figurine, and the arabesque and color of the
Persian potteries.
Photography and photographers have had the imitation of other mediums
clapped on their heads at almost every step in their development and in
their seeking to make pliable a medium which seems on the surface entirely
mechanical; and although this reproach was eminently justifiable in many
instances of flagrant imitation of the technique of inferior media—the writer