Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 33))

of the personality behind their making. While the almost brutal strength of
Steichen with its high-light accentuation carried the mind directly to the
dominating personality of Steichen himself—big, rugged, full of activity,
emotional, a veritable Danton among pictorialists, a mind whose mental
horizon is very broad and whose convictions are very strong and eager to
force themselves on others—a man certain to make staunch friends and bitter
enemies, and with all, a good fighter and one free from petty jealousies. In
the fine collection of Eugene’s work, which in certain aspects possesses some
of the characteristics of Hill, one feels the painter, the man who loves rich
color for itself, who loves life, beautiful, jovial, healthy, full-blooded life,
and glories in portraying it—a very meistersinger of the joy of living. Strongly
and curiously did the pictures of Seeley contrast with those of Eugene—
striking in composition, flat in treatment, decorative in character, and sug-
gestive of the dreamy sadness of living ghosts. Coburn, on the other hand,
dealt with neither the joy of living nor the sad dreams of living ghosts, but
the problems of compositions as suggested by city scenes and streets. Here
was the very evident influence of Japanese art in which there was little sug-
gestion of feeling or color—but strong feeling for urban pictorial possibilities—
that contrasts curiously with the purely architectural sense of Evans. The
work of De Meyer proved one of the most attractive groups in the exhibition.
Refined to a degree in both conception and treatment, at times quaint, at
times piquant—always vivacious, finished and delightful, always showing
exquisite taste and a masterful knowledge of technique, everything he dis-
played was of interest and his ‘‘Silver Skirt” was one of the most attractive
pictures of the exhibition. How marked the contrast between this and the
exhibition of Gertrude Kasebier, with its artistic irresponsibility and indilfer-
ence to mere technique; its curious impulsiveness; its inner blind groping
to express the protean self within—that finer, bigger self that cannot always
find voice and that resents any seeming lack of appreciation on the part of
others; of the respect that she feels is the due of the muse she worships.
Annie W. Brigman, on the other hand, seems to have sought to grasp the
very soul of nature, and her entire collection is rhythmic with the poetry of
nature, its bigness, its grandeur, its mystery. It is reminiscent of the Ovidean
metamorphoses, and the “Mid-Summer Night’s Dream”—pervaded with
a certain bigness of feeling that the splendor of our Western nature seems
to infuse into the soul. In this collection we quite lose sight of the personality
of their maker in the poetry and charm of the themes portrayed.
By all odds the most complete and finest in every respect were the col-
lections of D. O. Hill, J. Craig Annan and Alfred Stieglitz. The Hill collection
was largely confined to portraiture. Those of Annan and Stieglitz covered
a wider range and showed finely artistic perception and masterly technique,
together with an unswerving sincerity of purpose. Both marked by a curiously
keen sensitiveness, of which Annan’s was perhaps the more poetic and gentle,
Stieglitz’s the more symphonic and aggressive, but both sure of touch and
fertile of fancy. Amateurs in the real sense of that word, they represented
at its best the work of their several countries, and I derived from the study

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