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

Mr. J. Edgar Chamberlin in the Evening Mail:
Mr. Stieglitz’s catholicity and inclusiveness, at the little Photo-Secession Gallery, have
been commended in this column. Radicalism and originality should have their forum, because
genius is always dropping in upon us like a thief in the night, and we never know what strange
guise it may take. And many beautiful and significant things have been shown at the Photo-
Secession.
But we are inclined to think that Mr. Stieglitz has gone too far in admitting the pictures of
Max Weber. Here is an artist who has done very strong work, indeed, but who has reverted to
a rude sort of Aztec symbolism which seems to be without significance to any soul but himself.
Grotesque profiles, enormous eyes, bodies like jointed dolls, barbaric patterns in the place of
landscapes—these are the elements of Mr. Weber’s pictures, and their ugliness is appalling.
On the mysterious rock temples of the Mayas, these figures may have possessed significance.
To us they signify nothing except a strange, insane obsession on the part of an artist.
Mr. Tyrrell in the Evening World:
Alfred Stieglitz, the unterrified virtuoso of the Photo-Secession Gallery, No. 291 Fifth
avenue, has given Mr. Max Weber a show, to the extent of hanging thirty-one of the latter’s alleged
drawings and paintings, and admitting the public free to see them (if they care to) from 10 a. m.
to 6 p. m. daily, Sundays excepted, during the remainder of this month. There is no numbered
catalogue, but a printed “list of pictures” gives the titles all in a bunch, and you are supposed
to guess which is which. It is a lot of fun, and almost any title will fit almost any picture. For
example, here is a greenish thing which may be either “Water Pitcher and Apples” or “Connecticut
Landscape.” It is next to impossible to distinguish “Portrait” from “Congo Statuette,” or the
“White Horse” from the “Soprano Soloist.” In fact, the name “Vaudeville,” instead of being
applied to one unidentified comic valentine, ought to be used to designate the whole lot—for
instinctively you feel that the name Weber is incomplete without Fields.
Yet Mr. Stieglitz insists that this exhibition is no joke, but dead serious and on the level.
Is it contended that Mr. Weber really knows how to draw, if he chose to ? you ask. Sure!
Here are some charcoal drawings of his that won prizes at the Paris art schools, only they are not
shown with the other things. There is no distinction in mere draughtsmanship, you know. It
is the freaks that get the attention nowadays. They are conjectured to prove independence of
convention, and a naive, fresh and primitive way of seeing things.
No one is going to believe, however, that nature alone ever made anybody so bad an artist
as all this. Such grotesquerie could only be acquired by long and perverse practice.
Mr. B. P. Stephenson in the Evening Post:
We have long followed the exhibitions of the young artists who make the Photo-Secession
Galleries at No. 291 Fifth avenue their headquarters. We have listened to their own explanations
of their views and tried to understand. At times we have thought ourselves on the point of com-
prehending when something still more extravagant than anything that had appeared would be
exhibited on the walls of the galleries. What we believed we had learned was shocked out of us.
But never have we received so many shocks in such quick succession as from the exhibition of
paintings and drawings by Max Weber of this city, now being held at the Photo-Secession rooms.
We had suggested that the exhibition of Post-Impressionists, which caused such a sensation in
London, should be brought over here, so that at least New Yorkers could learn something about
what was moving in the air of art of the European Continent. We are content now that that
collection shall remain abroad, for Max Weber’s pictures are said to be a good example of what
a Post-Impressionism exhibition should be.
The catalogue contains some thirty-two names of pictures, but no numbers are given. So
the visitor must fit the names to whatever paintings seem to suit them best. That is what any one
who has a liking for intricate puzzles might enjoy. What title shall be fitted to what is presumably
the head of a woman, whose skin is bright orange, while the shadows are an equally bright green ?
Shall it be “Portrait” or “Bananas ?” It might well be the latter, for the extraordinarily long
neck, if it is really a neck, and an arm, if it be an arm, are not unlike brown bananas. Is a group

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