Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 34-35))

They want to go back to the past, to the primitive art, for they consider
it less conventional, more spontaneous, more like the truth, if not more truthful.
But they are groping as if they were studying the ground before entering
fully into it. They are making rehearsals that shock us, because they are
against all we have seen and learned. They find massed against them the
academic dogmas and the believers in them, who are unable to think, to have
their own ideas, and who repeat what they have heard, refusing to investi-
gate anything that would disturb the opinions they have inherited.
I have gone several times to study this movement, which is to me more
revolutionary than evolutionary, in which I have not yet found any manifes-
tation that can convince me of having its source direct in nature. I do not
know whether anything will come out of it; I do not dare to predict that it
will pass, as a fashion does, in time. I do not become enthusiastic with the
noisy applause and dithyrambs of the admirers of this revolution, nor do the
affronts and insults of its deprecators impress me.
In art, as in politics, both manifestations on the part of the public are
of no account, and the final result is the only one that counts. In every inno-
vator there is something of a redeemer, and every redeemer is crucified by
those he wants to redeem. This is a fatal law. Apotheosis may come later,
for after the Calvary comes the Tabor; but, for the present, they have to
undergo the Via Cruets, stopping at all its stations.
The main point of the fundamental idea of the founders of the Salon
d’Automne is the development of the personality of each artist, emancipating
them from the Academies, offering them all the necessary resources for its
accomplishment.
But it seems to me that the artists have not known how to take advantage
of this opportunity offered to them, and that in an unconscious way they are
grouping themselves into a school. I notice that they are officiating at the
altars of Greco, Cezanne and Gauguin, if not all, at least the majority of
them. Perhaps this is due to the difficulty inherent in complete and sudden
emancipation; the present is the fatal consequence of the past. Speaking
from my personal point of view, the movement is a sequel, a new form of the
primitive; it does not limit itself to painting and the other plastic arts, but
extends itself to literature and music, as I have found in the same Salon
d’Automne, where they have been giving Literary and Musical Matinees.
A long and narrow hall, somewhat dark, and very cold; a special audience,
not very numerous, composed for the most part of the poets affiliated with the
new school of libre-versistes; all with an air of mystic abstraction. Up front
a kind of platform, on which the yellow light of two enormous lamps fights
against the gray light that enters through the wide windows, making more
undefined the dark shadows which move in this atmosphere. These shadows
are the artists who are going to give conferences, or to read selected pieces
of the most conspicuous apostles of the new literary creed.
I felt as if I were present at one of those mysterious sessions of
the Eleusinian Priests, or in a “venta” of Carbonari, or at a religious ceremony
of the primitive Christians in the Catacombs of Rome. It looked somewhat

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