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

Miss Elizabeth Luther Carey in the N. T. Times:
The exhibition of lithographs by Manet, Cezanne, Renoir, and Toulouse-Lautrec, drawings
by Rodin, and little paintings and drawings by Henri Rousseau, which is at the Photo-Secession
Gallery until Dec. 8, will interest those rare minds which not only are concerned with the estab-
lished art of the past, but curious regarding the art of the future. None of the younger painters
can very certainly be heralded as a master of the art of the future, but they make an admirable
appearance together, and the progression is nicely modulated from the now almost classic Manet
and Rodin to the more revolutionary Cezanne, whose vast primitive talent seems to promise a
fame even more enduring than that of the others; to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, who went mad
after fifteen years of brilliant mocking accomplishment, and who already looks less strange than
Forain, and much more normal than Rodin in these great, swinging, vital sketches on the Photo-
Secession walls, to Henri Rousseau, whose “ dernier cri” is already an echo and whose paintings
like the “Vice” of the poem, we ‘‘first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
The “ Post-Impressionists’’ are at present having their day in London, and we may consider
the fortifications of the enemy successfully stormed if they carry the huge, stubborn town of the
Philistine. Are they entitled to victory ? Time will show, but only a pusillanimous critic will
keep back the expression of his conviction, and we may as well admit straightway that Cezanne’s
powerful white bathers lifting their big, gleaming bodies against a background suffused with color
by a few marks of blue and green chalk has to us every appearance of superb, vital, normal art,
sound and vigorous as that of the early Greeks. Renoir’s fat blonde woman with a baby flush on
her plump cheeks and a silly, drooping baby mouth has nothing of Cezanne’s noble authority of
vision and treatment, and belongs, of course, to a somewhat different tradition, but how the blood
zips under that thin skin!
It is when we come to the “naive and personal” Henri Rousseau that we feel that we are old,
and that the muscles of our mind must rebel a bit at such a leap as he asks us to take into the
unknown. If we had come upon him unprepared and in worse company it might very well have
been that we should have thought these childish canvases as much like the music of true art as
the croaking of frogs is like an Italian melody—yet the frogs, we may assume, chanted musically
enough for Aristophanes, and in the little brown sketches of a Paris quay, daintily worked out as
for an old copybook, we get a suggestion of the kind of charm exercised by this art upon its followers.
We get much more than a suggestion from the beautiful little vase, as rich as a piece of old majolica,
which the painter decorated, and we end by assuring ourselves that the man who could get such
color relations as that rather touching old vase reveals, was an artist born perhaps out of his due
time, but with the “gift.” So we close our eyes to the hideous “Mother and Child” and faithlessly
shirk that issue.
The next exhibition given in these enterprising galleries will be of drawings, etchings, and
wood-cuts by Gordon Craig, whose work will be seen publicly for the first time in America.
Mr. B. P. Stephenson in the Evening Post:
It was one of the French post-impressionists who remarked that in art there were only
plagiarists and revolutionists. Whether to describe the late Henri Rousseau, a few of whose works
are on exhibition at the Photo-Secession Gallery, No. 291 Fifth Avenue, as a plagiarist or a revo-
lutionist, we scarcely know. We are told of him by Alfred Stieglitz that “he began his career in the
Custom House service of the French government, but gifted with artistic instincts, he eventually
sought to express himself in plastic art. His work greatly interested the younger group of painters
and critics in Paris known as “Les Fauves,” who were his greatest friends and admirers up to the
last. He was truly naive and personal; a real “primitive” living in our time. He loved nature
passionately, and painted as he saw it. His larger work is very fantastic and decorative, and
recalls Giotto and other primitives. He lived a life of simplicity and purity, the spirit of which
dominates his work. We do not know his larger work, so cannot say whether it recalls Giotto or
not, but from what we saw of his paintings at the Photo-Secession Gallery we should say he was a
plagiarist of all that was poor in primitive art. If he really loved nature and painted as he saw it,
he must have been satisfied with a remarkably ill-looking mistress. It seems impossible to believe
that any man of artistic sense could have seen a villa and its grounds as Rousseau painted it;
there is neither color, form, nor atmosphere in the picture. Even less like any nature that normal

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