Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1909 (Heft 26))

CARICATURE AND NEW YORK

ART being the record of the self-consciousness of man, New York
is naturally incapacitated from appreciating the works of the
men who in the midst of the city’s mad money-frenzy are doing
something for the aesthetic advancement of the American
people. New York is not yet self-conscious; the American
people is not yet self-conscious. Until the senseless material
orgy is at an end and the brain ceases to be the handmaiden of the belly, art
must wait.
Especially is this so of the great and revealing art of caricature. The
New-Yorker is as temperamentally unfitted for appreciating caricature as
he is from experiencing emotion before an engraving of Felicien Rops or a
great play like Ibsen’s Rosmersholm. Always the finer, the supersensible, the
subtle, the ironic escapes his fat mind. He, being still a child, must have the
pretty and the pleasant. In matters artistic he is the Candy Kid. To him
the truth about anything is a kind of infamy. In caricature, he scents ugliness,
missing entirely the intellectual principle, the ironic twinkle.
The exhibitions of caricature which have been given from time to time
in New York have been poorly attended. Very little or almost nothing has
been sold at these exhibitions. The exhibition which was held here in 1904—
an exhibition which gave us the best work of Sem, Cappiello, Fornaro and
Max Beerbohm—resulted in the sale of a few of the Beerbohms, probably
because Beerbohm’s “art” comes nearer the comic Valentine stage than any
one else’s. And the comic Valentine is still confounded with caricature in
this country.
An exhibition of caricature lately held in the Little Gallery of the Photo-
Secession on Fifth Avenue was treated jocularly by a few reviewers and com-
paratively neglected by the public. These caricatures were among the most
remarkable ever seen in New York. They were the work of Mr. Marius de
Zayas; and, of course, were caviare to the general. Mr. de Zayas, like Sem,
Cappiello and Fornaro, insists that his art must be taken seriously. And why
not ? A caricaturist, like a great novelist, a great painter, a great sculptor,
sees the human race in his own way, his unique way, his own terribly sincere
way. He, like them, is a divinizing psychologist.
The caricaturist has his message. But here in New York it so hap-
pens that this message carries at its core the one great sin, which is a
violation of the Anglo-Saxon injunction: Thou shalt not commit irony!
To the caricaturist the world exists to be sneered at. And this sneer
is a serious matter. Swift, Voltaire and Flaubert—their works are a deadly
sneer, a cosmic sneer, a ghastly sneer; a sneer rooted in perception. It is
so, too, with the great caricaturist. His sneer is the sneer of all wis-
dom, the unarithmetical sneer of Aristophanes, the kindly-malicious wink
of Cervantes.
For the poet the world exists to be wondered at; for the scientist the
world exists to be analyzed; for the religious devotee the world exists to be

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