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

common explanation of anything that seems queer, any departure from the
old standards of artistic representation. The New York public was given a
good chance for comparison and study in the exhibition which followed of the
work of some of his supposed American disciples.
For the sake of record, we herewith reprint some of the criticisms which
appeared on this exhibition in the New York Press.

James Huneker in the “New York Sun”:
“Henri Matisse drawings are on view at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth avenue
(between Thirtieth and Thirty-first streets. Take the elevator if you do not weigh over 90 pounds);
and if you go there between 12 and 1 o’clock, midday, you may miss the grand panjandrum of the
gallery, Alfred Stieglitz. This warning is not meant to depreciate that ingenious gentleman,
rather it is as a safeguard against the seductiveness of his golden voice. Once open the porches of
your ears to his tones and ere long you will begin to believe that photography it was that originated
impressionism; that camera and Monet rhyme; that the smeary compound of mush and mezzo-
tint which they have christened the New Photography is one of the fine arts. There’s no resisting
Stieglitz. He believes what he preaches, a rare virtue nowadays; and he has done so much to open
the eyes of the philistines with his little exhibitions that he ought to go into the Hall of Fame.
The John Marin show last week was interesting and the first Matisse exhibition; above all, the
Toulouse-Lautrec drawings. This second batch of Matisse is fascinating; where his followers
plod panting miles behind, he leaps the stiffest barriers by reason of his sheer virtuosity. His real
friends (not the sort that moan in ecstasy over his new monkeyshines) and critics have noted, not
without regret, that the Master (he has attained the dignity of capitalization) is given to the bootless
task of shocking the bourgeois. Poor old bourgeois; how they have been shocked from the “Er-
nani” days of Theophile Gautier to the macabre merrymaking of Huysmans and the fumisterie
of Paul Gauguin! And the young fellows are still at it. Who hasn’t contributed his share, if his
boyhood were worthy the name ? The small boy snowballing the fat teacher is as much a symbol
of the revolt of youth against sleek authority as is an Emma Goldman lecture on Ibsen for the
instruction of our police. But why Matisse ? Here is a chap whose talent is distinguished. He can
make his pencil or brush sing at the bidding of his brain; better still, that brain is fed by eyes which
refuse to see humanity or landscape in the conventional terms of the school. He wishes not only to
astonish worthy folk but also to charm their check books. Paris is always a prey of the dernier cri,
and Matisse, unless he has been ousted during the last month, is not only the latest cry but, we hope,
the ultimate scream. At his worst he shocks; at his best his art is as attractive as an art can be that
reveals while it dazzles, makes captive when it consoles.
“The two dozen and more sketches on the walls of Mr. Stieglitz’s gallery are of a range and
intensity that must set tingling the pulse of any honest craftsman. It is not alone the elliptical
route pursued by Matisse in his desire to escape the obvious and suppress the inutile, but the creative
force of his sinuous emotional line. It is a richly fed line bounding, but not wiry, as is Blatte’s. Its
power of evoking tactile sensations is as vigorous, rhythmic and subtle as the orchestration of
Richard Strauss. Little wonder collectors in Paris are buying Matisse just because of his emotional
suggestiveness. There is a sketch in the middle of the east wall before which William Blake would
have paused and wondered. It is worthy of Blake, or it might have been signed, despite its casual
air, by one of the early Italian masters. Orphic or Bacchic, we can’t say which, these tiny figures
hold their own in a composition simple to bareness, each endowed with an ecstatic individual life.
In the right foreground, as seen by the spectator, a woman lies on the ground, a man sits hunched up
near by. The pair, without the remotest hint of the conventional erotic, tell more in a few lines
than could a volume. Only Rodin has compassed such, though his is the stenographic method of
the sculptor, not of the painter, especially of a painter whose color is so bewilderingly opulent as
that of Matisse. We can recall the names of but two living painters whose drawings possess the
vital line of the Frenchman; they are Augustus John, in whose veins flows fiery Welsh blood, and
Arthur B. Davies, American by birth, by descent Welsh. Those who have not studied the draw-
ings of Davies don’t know the real Davies.
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