Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1909 (Heft 27))

PAMELA COLMAN SMITH

PAMELA COLMAN SMITH has seen through many veils. To
her the universe is a congeries of suggestions. She has smitten
with the rod of her imagination this adamant world of such
seeming solids and vaporized it. And out of this vapor she has
shaped her visions of life, her symbols done in color, her music
matrixed and moulded to concrete shape.
No more curious and fascinating exhibition has ever been held in New
York than the exhibition of her drawings at the Little Gallery of the Photo-
Secession. She is a blender of visions, a mystic, a symbolist, one who trans-
figures the world she lives in by the overwhelming simplicity of her imagina-
tion. To me, these wonderful little drawings are not merely art; they are
poems, ideas, life-values and cosmic values that have long gestated within the
subconscious world of their creator—a wizard’s world of intoxicating evoca-
tions—here and now accouched on their vibrating, colored beds, to mystify
and awe the mind of some few beholders; to project their souls from off this
little Springboard of Time into the stupendous unbegotten thing we name the
Infinite.
Here—as in “Warum”—Man stands questioning the Infinite, or again,
as in “Closing Day,” a figure blasted with melancholia has dragged himself
to the eaves of space, or as in “The White Castle”—a wonderfully executed
piece of work—the eternal ascetic appears against the snowpeaks of spiritual
isolation. What matter the subject ? The artist here is saying the old immortal
things in a new immortal way.
Nature is a veil which the imagination of man has woven to cover his
nakedness. In the drawings of Miss Smith we are aware of standing before
these veils which her poetic intuitions have invested with a supernal, intoxi-
cating, hallucinating beauty. What secret lies athwart that “Elfin Music”
with its vague, innominable beauty, a picture that would have ravished the
soul of Keats or Shelley ? And those giant moons mirroring the eternal
Woman—does Isis uprear herself behind them? And in “Hushwood”—
what overworld has she here prefigured and depicted with nightmare-touch ?
So infinite suggestion stabs at us from out these canvases. They mean
more than we see; they mean more than their creator is aware of. And
everlasting mystery—Mystery with wistful face and ghostly footfall—wells out
from all these conceptions and shrouds us with humility.
Wonder and mystery and dreams! And the Infinite with its gleaming
veils of matter and the strange invasion of man in an alien universe! The
minds of the greatest visionaries are infantile—and here Miss Smith approaches
Blake and Beardsley. Only dullards believe in the commonplace; only
mediocrity feels life to be stale. Forever sealed is he who does not marvel at
his breath that comes and goes. Dead beyond all corpses are they who do
not feel the mystery of light and shadow or the meadow with its blanket of
snow. There is as much poetry in the world today as there ever was or ever

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