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

Mr. Arthur Hoeber in the N. T. Globe:
It used to be a basic principle in art that one could go as far as one liked, make all sorts of
experiments, diverge in various ways, but always the work should have a superstructure of truth,
and while facts after all are relative, there are certain underlying conditions that may not be
ignored, no matter what vagaries the painter undertakes. The features of the human face, for
example, must bear some relation one to the other, and there are demonstrable laws of anatomy
that cannot be ignored. Yet the new movement that seems to have taken Paris by storm and
certainly raised no end of a storm in London, inaugurated by, shall we say, Matisse, Cezanne,
and others, goes its own wayward course—by no means a cheerful one, either—and would seem
to make ugliness its aim, while it defies all known laws of construction, balance, color, form and
texture. We are asked to see charm of suggestion, given by crudity, awkwardness and repulsive-
ness, and we are calmly told that our eyes hitherto have been badly trained, that we have seen
wrong, that the things we have admired lack character, vitality, force, suggestiveness—all, in
short, that the advance movement now gives. In other words, these revolutionists would change
every previous point of view and substitute therefor a humanity of their own, not as God has made
it, and which to ordinary mortals, as well as Himself, seemed good, but a humanity in which grace,
beauty, conformity, balance and obedience to natural laws shall have no part. They would take
away our ideals and substitute therefor dreariness, heaviness, desolation.
Just at present the newest exponent of this art nouveau, one Max Weber, holds an exhibition
of a score of his work at the Photo-Secession Gallery, 291 Fifth avenue. Time was when these
delightful rooms were decorated with photographic prints of which Mr. Stieglitz is easily the
most competent authority in this—or perhaps any other country. As a connoisseur of painting,
however, we cannot speak so highly of his endowment—that is, if we are to take much of the
work he has admitted into his gallery as justifying his art knowledge. The more the work is
strange, crude, awkward, appalling, evidently the more it is in favor with him. The present
display marks the high-water mark of eccentricity. If it has any reason to exist, then the eyes of
the world in general are wrong, which, by the way, is just what these men insist. We are shown
females with eyes looking for all the world like two black clam shells slapped on the face, with a
mouth the size of a pea, and a nose unrecognizable to the average authority on noses. We are
told the psychology of the performance compensates for all other lackings, and we are asked to see
therein a thousand and one attributes that are explained with a gush of meaningless words. One
is reminded of the father of the late Augustus Saint Gaudens, who used to remark, “When you
say that, it sounds like nothing at all.” Here are travesties of the human form, here are forms
that have no justification in nature, but that seem for all the world like the emanations of some
one not in his right mind, such as one might expect from the inmate of a lunatic asylum, and the
landscapes have an equal relation to nature as the world generally sees it.
It is difficult to write of these atrocities with moderation, for they are positively an insult
to ordinary intelligence, and presuppose, most of all, on the part both of maker and spectator an
utter lack of humor—the one unforgivable sin. We are told that such pictures are the rage
abroad, that they make all other efforts seem impossible beside them, which we can well under-
stand, for if these are right, then surely all the rest of the world is wrong. At any rate, by the side
of these offerings by Max Weber, the Matisses seem academic, conventional, commonplace,
and we are sure before long the French innovator will be relegated to a back seat. If these have
any significance, then Michael Angelo, Leonardo, Titian, Rembrandt, Veronese, and the rest
of the men hitherto regarded as among the princes of art, become not only back numbers, but
ignoramuses, charlatans, whom it were well to consign to the awful obscurity they richly merit.
Yet we make bold to believe that some of these Italians and other Europeans who flourished long,
long ago, will somehow manage to get along and still to have a crowd of foolish admirers, and that
this new school will finally take its place with other fads that have had their brief day and have
finally been put where they belong as curious manifestations of unbalanced minds that sought
o obtain notoriety by novelty that which was denied them because of their incompetence when
they worked along sane and logical methods. We only recommend this display as a freakish
manifestation of unrest in art, perhaps as a protest against the conventional, if you will, but a
protest which serves no purpose, spreads no new facts, that only in the end makes more confused
all principles of truth and beauty.

I