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

And behold the wealthy American patrons of the arts! Ring Olympus
with thy laughter! They carry their exhausted souls to Europe and buy
“art objects/’ the great money value of which is the only thing they were
made to appreciate. While the American artist who has an original note,
who has seceded in order to preserve the inviolability of his own artistic genius,
rots in his rags in his hole of a studio. These “patrons” (or should we call
them padrones ?) ransack museums, purchase old palaces, bragging with the
brazenness of all vulgarity of the enormous prices they paid for them. They
are the Medusas of Indifference, the exposed guts of Respectability.
What can these Medusas of Indifference know of the eternal renascence
in art of the rebel ? The epiphany of a Rodin—it is, in truth, the instinct to
live. The rebel is the eternal knocker at the door of the House of Indiffer-
ence, the Voice that calls in all centuries to the pursuit of the Intangible.
Revolt is the cloven flame that consumes age after age the citadels of authority
and their dull commanders sheathed cap-a-pie in their ethical petticoats.
In the United States it is the hardest thing in the world to preserve your
artistic individuality. The Horla of Indifference will absorb you at last.
Threatening missives are borne to you upon every wind and the hint of penalties
falls on your ears from the moment you pronounce that word sacred to all
genius—I. You will have visions of the bread line. Fear—the obscene
bird—circles over your soul like a kite amorous of carrion. The cabals of
Indifference and Respectability are always in session; and your inspiration
begins to flutter like a candle in its fetid breath. The insinuative imps of
temptation swarm in and out of your clay. Bread line or automobile ? You
must decide. You are in the United States. You will, if you are not of the
Viking strain, end a mush of concessions.
Benjamin de Casseres.

FROM EDITH TO HER FRIEND IN WACO, TEX.

DEAR HELEN: All New York’s gone crazy over Sorolla.
No, my dear, he isn’t a pianist or a tenor, he’s a painter.
Isn’t it funny? Fancy a furor over a painter! And in
New York of all places, where so many really important
people turn up during the season! Imagine my surprise,
when my lady Boss ordered her chauffeur to drive to
156th Street—the Hispanic Museum ! What’s that? I asked. She didn’t
exactly know; but some fad, she understood, of that dear eccentric Archie
Huntington. The visit, she explained, was a nuisance: but a necessity.
Only yesterday thirty-four women at the Colonial Club had asked
her if she’d been to Sorolla’s. She had to go, to get immune. So, on
the way, instead of dictating her morning correspondence, she made me read
her a notice of the exhibition in the “N. Y. Shiner.” Art bores the dear old

25