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

man has seen is his little painting of a woman in a black dress who is kneeling or standing—one
cannot tell which—behind a little girl in a pink dress seated on a camp stool. The nose of the
woman occupies a good half of her face; that of the child takes up nearly two-thirds of hers.
Even Stieglitz had to confess he did not quite comprehend the picture, but some of the post-
impressionists discovered color in it. We are even forbidden to criticise the post-impressionists,
for, we are told by one of their great admirers, if they have done nothing else, they have proved
the futility of art criticism, which is founded on the formulas that they have discarded, and is
always a day later than the art criticised. The next exhibition at the Photo-Secession Galleries
will be devoted to a collection of drawings, wood-cuts, and etchings by Gordon Craig, the son of
Ellen Terry.
Mr. J. Edgar Chamberlin in the N. Y. Mail:
The Photo-Secession starts out its exhibitions of the year with a quaint and highly different
collection of drawings by Rodin, lithographs by Manet, Cezanne, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec,
and some small paintings and drawings by one of the French ultra-modern primitives, Henri
Rousseau.
The Rodin drawings reveal the well-known miraculous quality of that master of the plastic
form, and they are strangely and weirdly beautiful. They shiver with insight and originality.
Can anything be said of Lautrec except that he is Lautrec ? Look at the profile of that
satanic female, Yvette Guilbert. It is the Witch of Endor embodied in a hag-like but fascinating
profile.
Among the Renoir lithographs there is a beautiful nude sketch in which the pink flesh seems
to be alive.
Henri Rousseau is too primitive by far for ordinary consumption. A little portrait of a
woman and child is of unbelievable ugliness. But there is something seizing in a city landscape
in which the telegraph poles are considerably bent by the wind. Telegraph poles do not ordinarily
bend in the wind, but it somehow warms and comforts the imagination to see them doing it in a
picture. And in Rousseau’s color there is something extremely fresh, quaint, delightful.
The Photo-Secession will soon have an exhibition of the drawings, wood-cuts and etchings of
Gordon Craig, of London.
Mr. James Townsend in the American Art News:
A loan collection of some lithographs by Manet, Cezanne, Renoir and Toulouse-Lautrec,
a few drawings by Rodin, and some smaller paintings and drawings by Henri Rousseau, are on
view at the Photo-Secession Gallery, 291 Fifth Avenue, through Dec. 8. This little display gives
to the lovers, students and enemies of the progressive and aggressive movement in Paris of French
art, another of the opportunities which Mr. Stieglitz has furnished, and proposes to furnish, for
discussion and education of and in the work of the band of young and older Frenchmen who have
caused such a stir in the art of Europe the past few years. The drawings of Rodin are very
fragmentary, but thoroughly representative. There is a little nude by Renoir, charmingly drawn
and delicate in color, and three strong and typical lithographs by Cezanne. The sketches by
Toulouse-Lautrec are also representative, but presumably the interest of visitors will center most
in the three little pictures by the late Henri Rousseau, who died last September. These are loaned
by Mr. Max Weber, who was an intimate friend of the dead artist. Rousseau first began his art
career as a sculptor, and his work was taken up by the group of painters and critics in Paris known
as “Les Fauves.” He was an eccentric genius and Mr. Stieglitz calls him a “real primitive living
in our time, who loved nature passionately and painted as he saw it, whose larger work is very
fantastic and decorative and recalls Giotto and other primitives, and who lived a life of simplicity
and purity, the spirit of which dominates his work.”
While it is difficult to credit Mr. Stieglitz’s last assertion, if one is familiar with the life of the
Parisian “Fauves,” who were Rousseau’s close associates, and while one may not entirely endorse
the suggestion of Giotto in Rousseau’s work, he certainly was original and virile in his work. The
little landscape shown, while painted in almost flat tints, has undoubted strength and charm. It
will require some study and education to appreciate the figure work, “Mother and Child,” and it
is always puzzling to know why Rousseau and his school thought and think it necessary to pick out
ugly types.

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