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

mark indeed. One is able to enter with unalloyed pleasure into the
motive of the picture, and to enjoy in every part the means by which it has
been wrought out. To enlarge such a print, would be to reduce the
esthetic meaning of its passages of dark and light, to dislocate the harmony
of its tonal relations, and to increase, possibly, its effect of imposingness,
but at the expense throughout of quality. Charles H. Caffin.

HENRI MATISSE AT THE LITTLE GALLERIES.
ON April first the Photo-Secession sent out the following
invitation: “An Exhibition of Drawings, Lithographs, Water-
Colors, and Etchings by M. Henri Matisse, of Paris, will be
held at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth
Avenue (between thirtieth and thirty-first streets), New York, opening on
April sixth and closing April twenty-fifth. The Galleries are open from
ten a.m. till six p.m. daily, Sundays excepted.
“Matisse is the leading spirit of a modern group of French artists
dubbed cLes Fauves.’ The work of this group has been the center of
discussion in the art-world of Paris during the past two to three years. It
is the good fortune of the Photo-Secession to have the honor of thus intro-
ducing Matisse to the American public and to the American art-critics/*
The invitation had its expected effect. The public, the critics, and the
artists came and saw. As there were no catalogues of any kind and there
was no tradition or history about Matisse's work, every one was left to his
own resources. Here was the work of a new man, with new ideas—a very
anarchist, it seemed, in art. The exhibition led to many heated controversies;
it proved stimulating. The New York “art-world” was sorely in need of
an irritant and Matisse certainly proved a timely one. We herewith reprint
some of the principal criticisms that appeared in the New York press about
the exhibition:
J. E. Chamberlin in the N. T. Evening Mail:
“In France they call Henri Matisse ‘le roi des fauves.’ A ‘fauve’ is not exactly a wild
beast in our sense—it may even mean a gentle fallow deer—but when the French students apply
the term to an artist they certainly mean a wild one. The ‘fauves’ are the French equivalent
for the out-eighters of our ‘eight,’ and Matisse is their limit.
“That being the case, of course Mr. Stieglitz has his pictures at the Photo-Secession gallery.
They show Matisse, whose idea is that you should in painting get as far away from nature as
possible. If nature is to be followed, why, let the camera do that. The artist should paint only
abstractions, gigantic symbols, ideas in broad lines, splotches of color that suggest the thoughts that
broke through language and escaped, and all that.
“ No doubt this sort of thing should be treated with respect, just as adventism, Eddyism,
spiritualism, Doukhobor outbreaks, and other forms of religious fanaticism, should be. One never
knows when or where a new revelation is going to get started.
“But Matisse’s pictures, while they may contain a new revelation for somebody, are quite
likely to go quite over the head of the ordinary observer—or under his feet. A few broadly
simple sketches are strangely beautiful, perhaps. Yet they are not beyond the power of any other
trained artist.