Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 29))

generation, and perfect as his drawing was—certainly the most brilliant basis
of his development—his special importance lies in his mastery of large sur-
faces. . . .”—Meier-Graefe.
Very great things were expected from him when he died at the early age of
thirty-seven. His lithographs are unique—brilliant to the last degree. Lau-
trec was a very prolific worker. His important lithographs number about
one hundred and fifty. The small collection of about thirty picked proofs
(including the series of “Elies”; “Woman with Dog at Cafe”; “Truffier in
Les Femmes Savantes”;) shown in this exhibition—which by the way is the
first Lautrec exhibition held in the United States—can give but an inadequate
notion of the essential importance of the man. In the quality of some of his
lithographs he ranks with Whistler.”

For the sake of record we herewith reprint some of the criticisms which
appeared in the New York daily press upon the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibi-
tion.
James Huneker in the N. Y. Sun, January 2, 1910:
A human ass—and his tribe does not decrease—once made the profound remark that he
never read Dickens because so many common people circulated through the pages of his novels.
We call this remark profound, for it illustrates in the clearest manner what has been named “the
heresy of the subject.” The majority of persons do not go to the theatre for the sheer joy of the
acting, do not read books because they are well written, or look at pictures because they are painted
artistically. The subject, the story, the anecdote, the “human interest,,, “little touches,” all the
various traps that snare the attention from poor or mediocre workmanship—the traps of senti-
mentalism, of false feeling, of cheap pathos and of the cheap moral, these the greater public will-
ingly embraces and hates to be reminded of its lack of taste, of its ignorance. The man who first
said “give the people what they want” was probably born close to the tertiary epoch, though his
fossil remains as yet undug; but we are assured that he was a mighty chief in his tribe. So are
his successors, who have cluttered the marketplaces with their booths, mischievous half art and
tubs of tripe and soft soap. Therefore we select for his courage the snobbish chap who found
Dickens ordinary; to him Millet would have been absolutely vulgar.
The cult of the subject is warmly worshipped in America and England. It nearly ruined
English painting half a century ago, and even today you must go to the Glasgow or the Dublin
galleries to see contemporaneous art naked and unashamed. In New York we are more lucky,
though here the public, always prudish, prefers the sleek soapy surfaces of Cabanel’s “Venus” or
the oily skin of Henner to the forthright beauty and truth of Manet’s “Olympia”—now known as
“Notre Dame de Louvre.” If Dickens had made his “low” characters after the style of Italian
opera peasants; if Manet had prettified his nudes, censors would have called them blest. We have
selected these names at random; Dickens is the idol of the middle class (the phrase is not of our
making), while Manet fought for recognition in a Paris not too easily startled. In reality he was
a puritan in comparison with his predecessors and successors, not to mention such contemporaries
as Gerome, Boulanger, Cabanel and Lefebvre, men who painted nudes their life long. But they
knew how to mix saccharine on their palettes; Manet did not.
But what would our friend the snob say if he went to Mr. Stieglitz’s Little Gallery of the Photo-
Secession, 291 Fifth avenue, and saw the original lithographs of the ill fated Count Henri de
Toulouse-Lautrec! Either faint or fight; no middle course in the presence of these rapid snap-
shots from life by a master of line. The subjects would be revolting to our possible case, and no
doubt they will prove revolting to most people who mix up art with their personal preferences for
the stale, the sweet, the musk moral. Lautrec’s favorite browsing ground was Montmartre, the
Montmartre of twenty years ago, not the machine-made tourists’ fake of today. You will get a
prose parallel in the early stories of Huysman’s in “Les Soeurs Vatard,” though not in the tinselled

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