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

humbug reigns as in no other place on the planet. Nor have the Yankees the monopoly in bad
art. That superb Montmartre jackass—literally—Boranali (wasn’t that the name given him by
the farceurs ?) had a following, and it wouldn’t be surprising if a school known as the Master of
the Jackass had sprung into existence, tail and all. And when writers can speak of Henry
Rousseau’s work as “ virginal, candid, ingenuous,” then it is time to ask yourself if the younger
men aren’t more humorous than their granddaddies. Virginal fiddlesticks! Candid twaddle!
Ingenuous stupidities!
The examples of Rousseau at Mr. Stieglitz’s bandbox gallery are pathetically ludicrous,
especially as they are hung in company with such masters as Rodin, Renoir, Cezanne, Toulouse-
Lautrec. How wonderfully solid and savant are the Cezanne drawings! The Renoir is not
particularly appetizing, and the Manets are in nowise distinguished, though a Manet is always
a Manet; and the Toulouse-Lautrecs are marked with the febrile power that signifies the marsh
light of his genius. Rousseau’s admirers speak of a terrific production of his entitled “Le Reve
d’Yadwiglia,” which must resemble in equal proportions the dream of a maniacal cheesemonger
and the waking thoughts of a tomcat. Yadwiglia is a young Polish maiden; she lies extended
upon a velvet canape, the color violently sanguinary and the surrounding a tropical forest. The
flowers are ghoulish, the lady is without raiment. What it all means doesn’t much matter, we
have seen compositions of admired symbolists and revered Academicians that didn’t mean much.
But they were well painted. Rousseau’s ideas of paint, design and composition are rudimentary.
(And he bears the august name of the great landscapist of French art!) To deify his ignorance
smacks of the silly or the hysterical. He is hailed by some as a modern Primitive. So
are the students on Fifty-seventh street West when they give their annual fakir’s exhibi-
tion. There is too much gush over “divine awkwardness” and “inspired amateurship.”
Or emus!

Mr. Tyrrell, in the N. T. World:
Alfred Stieglitz, the Mystery of Picture Lane, has appeared again at 291, the tiny and
intimate little gallery up aloft where no 200-pound Philistine ever penetrates, because the toy
elevator is not big or strong enough to carry him up. The occult name of “Photo-Secession” is
on the signboard, though photographs are never taken and but rarely exhibited here, and Mr.
Stieglitz personally is about the gentlest-mannered art rebel that ever defied dull conventionality or
harbored conspiracies against the commonplace.
A pleasing all-round paradox is Stieglitz — a dreamer who is so wideawake that he
sees genius coming years before it arrives, or maybe it never does arrive; a picture connoisseur
who is always putting up a fight for the recognition of somebody or something, and yet is bored
by success — who is a loyal lover of Rubens, and at the same time gives the glad hand to
Matisse—who delights in showing things that nobody wishes to buy or would accept as a gift,
and when he does occasionally trot out something that people would pay any price for, it is not
for sale!
There is a little of both these kinds in the present show at the Photo-Secession Gallery—
surely one of the most extraordinary, for its size, that has ever been seen in this town, where
anything and everything is possible. It will be on until Dec. 8, and probably by the beginning of
next year people will be talking about it emphatically in the past tense.
It consists of a loaned collection of modern French lithographs by Manet, Cezanne, Renoir,
and Toulouse-Lautrec; a few precious though fragmentary documents (they cannot be called
drawings, nor even sketches, in the ordinary understanding of these terms) by the great Rodin;
and some small paintings by the late Henri Rousseau, a Parisian “primitive” whose work is
said to have seriously interested that younger group of painters and critics known as les Fauves,
or, as you might say, the Wildcats.
Here is antithesis for you—the faintly shadowed dreams of the titanic sculptor and the
crude dabblings of an untrained child—for poor Rousseau, a simple and lovable personality no
doubt, was a primitive in art merely because, like Peter Pan, he never grew up and never learned
to paint, or even to see intelligently the nature which he is said to have “passionately loved.”
But Rodin and Henri Rousseau!—it is like Jove’s thunder and lightning and a kid letting off
firecrackers.

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