Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 36))

criticism. The art of Millet, Chavannes, Rodin, Cezanne, has the ambition
to generate some rare composite type of beauty. With them beauty becomes
distinguished, individual, a noble evocation of intellectual and emotional life.
But they all express solitary inventions. There is no supreme harmony that
links them together. There seems to exist in our time no need of pure and
fixed fundamental forms.
In that sense Blake went farther than any. To him line was an illusive
phantasmagoria that gleamed in an underground world. He gathered his live
inspiration from the primitive elemental ideas of beauty. He felt vaguely that
art had to be drawn back to its source to be classified and corrected, and that
from time to time it must burst through the surface of conventions with
irresistible natural power.
Max Weber is such a visionary. He has a fine sense for unusual color
combinations and a keen perception of form construction. Nothing would be
more futile than to assert that this young artist cannot draw. But, like Blake,
he shrinks from the notion that the form the eye apprehends is all, and for that
reason entertains a proud disdain for the cold correctness of academic draughts-
manship. He has the analytical mind for investigation and that revolutionary
desire to create a new world out of himself. A futile dream, as Goethe has
told in his Faust. Art is a spontaneous growth out of the influences of con-
temporary society. If the ideals of society are crude and narrow, art cannot
expand to its highest sense of beauty. One mind, however inexhaustible, can-
not be the fountain of youth that rejuvenates the mildewed conventions of art.
Every man of genius has to go back to something that is outside of him.
A painter’s defiance of academic form may lead him to the many-headed
gods of the East, the twisted limbs of Polynesian idols, the grotesque carvings
of Totem-poles, the overcharged symbols of Mexican reliefs, and the disturb-
ing, incomprehensible, almost shapeless figures of sanguinary divinities of some
mysterious black race. But he needs must dive into some world of shadows
where material facts dissolve; and images, without losing their spiritual motive,
whirl and stretch into the infinite. He must be an iconoclast and shatter the
traditions which cling about the relics of former artistic ideals. He must see
the past and present with fresh eyes and translate these manifestations in a new,
untrammeled fashion.
The Impressionist changes local values to suit his own exceptional color
schemes. Why should a similar privilege be denied to the interpreter of form ?
Why should he not pursue it to its structural units, and discover in them a new
flavor of beauty ? Does not form possess the same themes of variations, ampli-
fication and admixture as color ? Geometrical shapes form the intelligent and
austere understructure of all arts, in a palace as well as a poem, in a symphonic
movement as well as in a monument or a mural decoration. A rhomb, an
isosceles and ellipse are beautiful in themselves. The painter who pursues this
path of the harmonic relation of parts will have the big conception of the
generality of things, without which art lacks the sense of proportion and inner
harmony, no matter how enchanting it may appear to the casual beholder. To

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