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

those that draw the standard, of course, though some one else might do very much better. But
whoever may set the standards, there is a great danger that anything done by rule will soon lack
spontaneity, sincerity and originality; for the letter still killeth while the spirit giveth life. The
painting of respectability always tends to become a conventional sort of picture-making, inoffensive
but uninspiring. And very many of the collections of this and other countries hardly deserve
the name of collections since they consist simply of representative works of standard artists and
bear no impress of the collector’s individuality and personal taste. There is no particular reason
why they should be kept together. One understands how far the process of standardization has
gone when he hears a dealer say: “A representative 18x24 canvas by So-and-So is worth so
much money.” It sounds a good deal like making and selling pictures by the yard.
Now, the complaint of the Post-Impressionists is that the modern painter is solely a technician
expressing nothing in his art. As they look back over the whole period of painting they note that
the old masters expressed religious feeling with unexcelled fervor; that the seventeenth century
masters painted the human face as well, perhaps, as it can ever be done, and that our contem-
poraries have reproduced the external appearance of things as accurately as a camera. Then they
inquire, as has been done on this page, “What next ?”
If we understand Mr. Weber at all, it is his aim to produce, first of all, a decoration, and
secondly, to express feelings and emotions he has either witnessed or experienced, and that have
left their impression upon him; in a word, to visualize the invisible. In constructing his decorations
he adopts an impersonalism, endeavoring to fill a certain space with geometrical designs, and to
this end he contorts and distorts the human figure as expediency may require. He does not aim
to paint portraits or figure compositions; indeed, he is not of the “make-like” school, and realism
has no place in his aesthetics. This is the phase of art that we have likened before to modern
program music, and it would not be surprising to find a Post-Impressionist painting mustard red,
not because it is red, but because it is hot in the mouth and red is the color of fire.
If anything is ever to be accomplished along this line a very great genius must arise to do
it, and we are not convinced that he has arrived. And if we cannot swallow Post-Impressionism
“hook, bait and sinker,” we may at least say: “Let it alone; perhaps some good will come out
of it.” We are not at all persuaded that Mr. Weber is on the right road or that humans can ever
lay aside their consciousness of pain at the sight of malformed bodies long enough to enjoy his
canvases. Arthur B. Davies has done much the same thing in a way that entertains both the
mind and the senses far more and without breaking so openly with “respectability” and the
public opinion that is, after all, the product of centuries of growth and progress and that need not
inspire a radical revolution. It would seem to us more promising for these revolutionary spirits
to acquire the superb technique of their ablest contemporaries and consecrate it to an art that
satisfies the spirit more completely. Nothing ever survives built on a foundation of falsehood, so
we fear that Weber has not found the path that leads from “respectability” upward.
Miss E. L. Carey in the N. Y. Times:
Visitors to the Grafton Galleries during the recent Post-Impressionist exhibition and readers
of the London newspapers will certainly be interested to see what impression such an artist as
Max Weber, who is now showing his work at the Photo-Secession Galleries, makes on America.
The impression made upon the visitor accustomed to the academic conventions and to the
bland tenderness of modern ideals in art inevitably will be deeply shocking. Visitors familiar
with the old masters of secondary fame will no doubt find certain resemblances to those restless,
tortured spirits who, like Tura, molded their material into vital and barbaric forms, or who, like
El Greco, strove to render the mystical spirit of the age through methods of expression dictated
by their own powerful personality. Mr. Weber, together with the rest of the Post-Impressionists,
rejects the idea of representation as a true function of art, and those who are inclined to see in his
distorted forms and his faces, contradicting all our preconceived ideas of the normal human counte-
nance, only the incoherent expression of a painter untrained in the grammar of his language,
will do well to prepare themselves by a glance at the charcoal drawing in the smaller room, an
“academy” drawn according to the usual conventions of the life class, but of extraordinary, of
truly surpassing merit. Obviously it is the choice of knowledge, not the accident of ignorance,
that has tempted the artist into these new paths.

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