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

establish without hesitation its concrete significance. Yet that is not the
quality of which I am conscious. It is not the facts but the spirit of nature that
I find interpreted in these landscapes. They are heightened visions of the
scene; heightened first of all by elimination of the assertions of fact, secondly
by enforcing the assertion of color. And everything is attuned to that higher
conception of painting which will eventually leave to photography the recording
of factual phenomena, and reserve for itself the most complete interpretation,
in a word, the most abstract expression possible.
Meanwhile, I do not say that every one of Steichen’s latest pictures achieves
what he is trying for in all, or that in any he has reached the full expression of
what he feels. So far, these daylight pictures do not attain to the quality of
expression that is appreciable in his nocturnes. A few days ago a friend
remarked to me that it is only in early morning pictures and nocturnes one
should expect to find the spiritual suggestion of nature adequately realized.
Such is the force of habit. For my own part I reject it. I am willing, how-
ever, to admit that hitherto painting has not succeeded in interpreting under the
clear light of day the same degree of spirituality which reveals itself in the
penumbra. But, if the spirituality exists at all, and for our purpose it does
exist if we will it shall, it must be present everywhere at all times. Therefore
it is only a question of time, when the man who feels that it so exists will find
the way to express it fully. I know no artist more likely to be the interpreter
than Eduard J. Steichen.
Charles H. Caffin.

For the sake of record we reprint some of the criticisms that appeared in
the press on the Steichen exhibition:
Mr. Mather in the “Evening Post”:
“About four years ago Eduard J. Steichen, who already enjoyed fame as a ‘secessionist’
photographer, surprised the town by a little show of paintings. The ‘Evening Post’ then had the
pleasure of pointing out the freshness of this work, its confident mastery of the pointilliste formu-
las, and its picturesqueness of arrangement. Whoever goes to the Montross galleries expecting a
repetition of the old sensations will be disappointed. Mr. Steichen has renounced broken color
and impaste in favor of smooth surfaces. The effects now depend upon the modulation of large
masses of local or decorative color and the general balance of such masses. Our artist is going
over, for the moment, at least, to the side of Whistler, Henri Riviere, or to eschew disadvantageous
comparisons, the Dabo freres.
“ Before interrogating too narrowly the art of these pictures, certain obvious technical merits
should be acknowledged. Mr. Steichen knows how to make a sky sing by simple modulation of
the tone, without having resource to snappy handling of the brush. The pellucid depth of the blue,
the poise of hanging clouds—all these celestial features are caught directly without troubling the
surfaces. This knack, rather common among the tempera painters of the early Renaissance, is
rare enough to-day. Similarly, the broad necessary masses or green or russet that mean grass or
Autumn oaks are spread frankly and give no sense either of thinness or of garishness. The deco-
rative effect of each of these thirty-one canvases is deftly calculated. In fact, it is this air of an old
hand, in a painter still almost in his artistic nonage, that both piques one’s curiosity and arouses
misgivings as to the future. Is it possible *hat experience can add anything to what already looks
so complete ?
“In this art there is absolutely no fumbling and apparently no dealing with nature for her
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