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

exasperation of a futile possession; and the energy of the embrace is indi-
cated in the great hand that lies like a weight upon the shoulders. It is hideous,
overpowering, and it has the beauty of all supreme energy.
“And these drawings, with their violent simplicity of appeal, have the
distinction of all abstract thought or form. Even in Degas there is a certain
luxury, a possible low appeal, in those heavy and creased bodies bending in
tubs and streaming a sponge over huddled shoulders. But here luxury
becomes geometrical; its axioms are demonstrated algebraically. It is the
unknown X which sprawls, in this spawning entanglement of animal life,
over the damped paper, between these pencil outlines, each done at a stroke,
like a hard, sure stroke of the chisel.
“For, it must be remembered, these are the drawings of a sculptor,
notes for a sculpture, and thus indicating form as the sculptor sees it, with
more brevity, in simpler outline, than the painter. They speak another
language than the drawings of the painter, searching, as they do, for the
points that catch the light along a line, for the curves that indicate contour
tangibly. In looking at the drawings of a painter, one sees color; here, in
these shorthand notes of a sculptor, one’s fingers seem actually to touch
marble.”

A WINTER NIGHT
The clouds, like fleecy sheep, go flocking by,
As though for shelter from the winds at war . . .
When they have fled, like lucent, crystal spar
Gleams the pale aether of the moon-lit sky . . .
Then hear the northwest wind sweep out on high
And fill the great, steel dome, till space grows far
In icy nothingness, and star by star
Keens in the void, to answer the wind’s cry.
This is the winter song of heaven; and earth
Darkling beneath, congealed, marks—trace by trace,
With dots of warmer light—house, street, and town—
Her humanness! See, on the vague, dark girth
Of the horizon rim, that jeweled space
Where the great city glitters like a crown.
Dallett Fuguet.

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