Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 24))

different opinions, the best men of our times, I believe; from Gustave
Geffroy, the best writer on French art; Rodin, the greatest sculptor of many
centuries; down to Matisse, one of the most discussed artists of the younger
set, a fauve> to use the expression that a certain critic applies to the most
revolutionary searcher in the new school of painting. I would have liked
still further to have enlarged this little inquiry, if certain material difficulties
had not arisen; to have visited again, for example, Besnard, who was able to
appreciate some of Steichen’s work; to have met M. Leonce Benedite, cura-
tor of the Luxembourg, who had, with the greatest amiability, put himself at
my service; and finally to have consulted an academician “like M. Bonnat
or M. Flameng,,, if the latter, for example, would have lowered himself even
to think about photography.
The following, without special order, is a report, to the best of my
ability, and above all without partiality, of the frank opinions I have received:
RODIN
After the Greeks and the builders of cathedrals, after Michael Angelo,
the Venetians, and Rembrandt, of the past; with, in our times, Puvis de
Chavannes, Carriere and Monet, Rodin is the most intense, the most pro-
lific realizer of Life, of total Beauty. His chief works include: “L’Age
d’Airain”; “St. Jean Baptiste”; “les Bourgeois de Calais”; “le Baiser”;
“le Penseur”; “la Porte de V Enfer”; “Victor Hugo”; “Balzac”; and so on.
“ I believe that photography can create works of art, but hitherto it has
been extraordinarily bourgeois and babbling. No one ever suspected what
could be gotten out of it; one doesn’t even know today what one can expect
from a process which permits of such profound sentiment, and such thorough
interpretation of the model, as has been realized in the hands of Steichen. I
consider Steichen a very great artist and the leading, the greatest photog-
rapher of the time. Before him nothing conclusive had been achieved. It
is a matter of absolute indifference to me whether the photographer does, or
does not, intervene. I do not know to what degree Steichen interprets, and
I do not see any harm whatever, or of what importance it is, what means he
uses to achieve his results. I care only for the result, which however, must
remain always clearly a photograph. It will always be interesting when it
be the work of an artist.”
GUSTAVE GEFFROY
Journalist, art critic—the first of the day—and novelist of exquisite
feeling, Gustave Geffroy has assembled in his eight volumes of “ La Vie Artis-
tique” his ardent studies on modern art; his clear-sighted essays in favor of
the impressionism of Rodin, of Carriere, of all the artists “ misunderstood ”
and independent. The volumes of“Notre Temps”, a collection of articles which
have at various times appeared; his monograph on Blanqui; “T Enferm6”; his