Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 30))

After Steichen had learned to mingle the study of painting with the prac-
tice of the camera, his most notable essays in the former medium were “noc-
turnes.” It was in the sequence of his development that they should be. In
the first place, the tonality of a nocturne is the nearest thing that painting
presents to the tonality of a photograph, at least in technical principles. Then
Whistler, whose influence few if any moderns have escaped—for I do not con-
sider your academic painter a modern—affected this young man profoundly.
He found in the great artist not only technical example but a kinship of spirit.
Steichen himself is somewhat arrogantly intolerant of the commonplace; rap-
turously devout toward that which is choicely beautiful; but, first and fore-
most, he was keenly sensitive to the master’s abstraction of spirit, to his prefer-
ence for the expression of the idea. So Steichen sought it where for a while,
in the seventies, Whistler sought it, and where we ordinary folk who are not
painters seek for it, especially when we are young, namely, in the twilight and
the night. It is in the penumbra, between the clear visibility of things and their
total extinction in darkness, when the concreteness of appearances becomes
merged in half-realized, half-baffled vision, that spirit seems to disengage itself
from matter and to envelope it with a mystery of soul-suggestion.
Accordingly in the two exhibitions of Steichen’s work, held at an interval
of two years in Mr. Eugene Glaenzer’s Gallery, it was the nocturnes that
attracted most interest. There were a few sunlit scenes, but they had neither
been so fully comprehended nor so well rendered. Again, in the latest exhibi-
tion there were still some nocturnes, which were preferred by many people
who have got the nocturnal habit and are disinclined to change. But the
pictures in this genre were in the minority and did not represent the chief
interest to those who are watching Steichen’s growth. Evidence of the latter
they found in his subjects of radiant or softened sunlight. These represented
a distinct step in advance, because they showed the attack upon a problem at
once more difficult and more vital. Psychologically speaking, it is to express
the spirituality of things plainly seen; to extract from the concrete appearances
of daylight their abstract expression. Technically, it is to escape from the
arbitrary restrictions of tonality and to harmonize the conflicts of local color,
seen in the glow of natural light.
These two elements of the problem represent an advance beyond the noc-
turnes even of Whistler and constitute The New Thought in painting. The
difference may to some extent be illustrated by a comparison of the soul-dramas
of Ibsen and Maeterlinck, respectively. The latter in “Monna Vanna”
projects the conflict against the vague romance of the past and, still more
characteristically in “Pelleas and Melisande” sets his men and women in a
spiritual penumbra, wherein they move uncertainly as in a soul-picture. Ibsen,
on the contrary, deals with everyday people of his own time, viewed in the clear
light of daily experience. There is no evasion of the concrete and material,
no seeking refuge in the penumbra or explicit investing of the facts with a spirit-
ual overlay. He does not project the soul-meaning of his play on to the charac-
ters like a spot-light, but makes the characters irradiate from within themselves
their own light of spiritual suggestion. With him the abstract is implicit in

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