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

out-of-doors, although he has taken good care to avoid the usual, the commonplace and the obvious.
It is a nature he has caught in curious moods under strange combinations of color or form, mainly
under evening effects of rare subtlety and poetry, and, it must be confessed, the note is new, harmo-
nious for the most part and genuinely artistic. One was sure at the beginning, however, that Mr.
Steichen would not be content to follow along familiar lines, since from the first he has been inter-
estingly original, novel—we might say poetically—socialistic! Obviously he has caught some of
the spirit of the secessionistic group of Europeans, snatching now a bit of atmospheric treatment,
here annexing the secret of brilliant light, and so flooding his themes, and generally he has been
wise enough to accept the virtues and reject the faults of the daring experimenters who have been
the downfall of so many of their followers. Mr. Steichen has preserved his balance through it all
and has come out of some rather questionable society—artistically speaking, of course—unscathed.
“It is where he has tagged on in a mild way this new influence to his old manner that he is
most successful, as for example, in his ‘Nocturne at Chateau du Doux,’ an exquisite rendering of
delicate birches coming up vague against a late afternoon moonlit sky. There is a stream and back
is blue distance, all charmingly indicated, in the suggestion rather than in the concrete, with a
happy result. And there are some five or six glimpses of the valley of the Morin under differing
effects of the night and the morning, with skies of tender cloud forms and delicate color, genuinely
poetic renderings of beautiful phases of the time of the day. A large canvas at one end of the room,
‘Across the Great Divide,’ is a dramatic composition full of intensity, of a large feeling of space
and distance, as well as of the conformation of the country, and it is very fine in its color arrange-
ment, yet without perhaps the vibratory qualities the later work possesses. It has interested
this artist to find in large stretches of French landscape, with many fields squared off with mathe-
matical precision, with trees and streams, themes for compositions, seeing them all under enter-
taining effects of light and shade, enveloped in the strong golden light of the late afternoon, again
under the dramatic contrasts of approaching storm, but always holding the interest of the spectator.
“Attention is particularly called to an unusual achievement of Mr. Steichen in his study of
‘Red Poppies,’ for a more brilliant result with pigment on canvas we have yet to see. It fairly ra-
diates light and glows in its luminosity. In another room are some photographs. It will be recalled
that Mr. Steichen occupies a unique place as an amateur photographer, a curious term, by the
way, for the class of ‘amateurs’ to which Mr. Steichen belongs really means the highest grade of
photographic professional. Here, then, are some wonderful portraits of the painters, Watts and
Lenbach; the sculptor, Rodin; the writers, George Bernard Shaw and Anatole France; the mu-
sician, Richard Strauss; President Taft and his predecessor, Mr. Roosevelt; J. Pierpont Morgan;
the painter himself with his wife; and Eleanore Duse, not to mention several views of Rodin’s
famous statue of Balzac. In this direction Mr. Steichen has said the last word, and there remains
only to chronicle the fact that the prints fortunately are here. It is, in short, one of the distinctly
artistic displays of the season, and on no account should it be missed.”
J. Edgar Chamberlain in the “ Evening Mail”:
“Eduard J. Steichen is another artist who is an impressionist in the broad, original sense of
the word, and not a mere follower of a school of art which paints in a certain way and is named
‘impressionist’ for want of a better word. The exhibition of Mr. Steichen’s paintings and photo-
graphs at Montross’s gallery this week and next brings together the work of a man whose methods
are greatly interesting the artistic world.
“Mr. Steichen is a colorist with an extremely subtle sense of harmonies and of the intenser
and more mystical aspects of nature. He paints strange nocturnal combinations of clouds, moon
and sky, with terrestrial objects seeming to mount into the heavens by vague juxtaposition. He
does not emphasize or depend upon line for his effects; in fact, he rather ignores line, and expresses
himself in masses and rich color suffusions. His sense of color is certainly most keen, and he pro-
duces delightful effects.
“The large picture of the Rocky mountains in Colorado, called ‘Across the Crest of the Great
Divide,’ might be called, with entire propriety, ‘God’s Rest.’ It suggests to the mind the creative
intelligence brooding over the mountains after it had finished them. Deep and mysterious blues,
illimitable distances, far dim clouds on the horizon, dark clouds above, billowing successions of
ranges—all these and other elements make the picture one of great nobility and beauty.
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