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

To a certain extent, as we have indicated, they are not new. It is not a new thing—only an
elementary thing—for an artist to force his arrangement of masses in a given space into architec-
tural and geometric forms. Not only have all decorators done this, but all the painters of the
smallest easel pictures which possess the beauty due to intelligent space composition. It is a
commonplace of criticism to recognize that Raphael’s pretty peasant girls owe their effect of
large and tranquil beauty not so much to his delicate rendering of their type as to his knowledge
of how to place them in relation to their surroundings. Therefore Mr. Weber is following a well-
established tradition in arranging his perpendiculars and horizontals, his spheres and cubes, and
his Gothic arches, with uncompromising severity of structure. His gross forms, also, simplified
until they resemble primeval beings hewn out from rock, and enigmatically a part of the earth,
are not without ample suggestion of the past. In his distortion of the features to emphasize
certain characteristics he seems to us to be not merely traditional, but archaistic. In a logical
analysis the exaggeration of an eye beyond its natural boundaries to express intensity of vision
springs from the same impulse that caused the painters of an earlier time to characterize types
by writing their names on scrolls coming out of their mouths. In neither case does nature supply
the material. It is this touch of archaism which seems to us to be the real menace of the movement,
and not, certainly, its novelty or its originality. These, so far as they exist, are bound to be its
salvation, but no very great artist is ever a reactionary, and it is in this harking back to the treat-
ment of the human features as a formal mask that we find an ominous significance.
In the effort of the Post-Impressionist to express as simply as possible what he feels, or as
in the case of the feebler members of the school, thinks he feels, about the visible world and its
elements is the germ of a most interesting theory, and the fact that Mr. Weber’s feeling and our
own are for the most part diametrically opposed has very little to do with the question. All of us
who have worked in art schools know how a pupil will start in unashamed to put on paper or
canvas his conception of the model with results as grotesque from the initiated point of view as
anything ever produced by a Bosch or a Breughel. Then comes the sacrifice of that enchanting
and absurd simplicity to canons and conventions that weaken sensation and vision and make the
work of the advanced student look like the work of all the other advanced students. Then, if
the student is destined to be even a very little master, comes the mighty struggle to regain the
lost simplicity, and, all panoplied with knowledge, to achieve again the free movement of unimpeded
ignorance. Mostly this ends in failure, a failure deftly concealed from the public, but not from
the artistic conscience which needs a great deal of soothing syrup in the so-called ‘‘maturity” of
an artist’s powers. Well, the Post-Impressionists are prepared to sacrifice everything to this
intensity of feeling and of simplification, and they propose not to lose the first force of their impres-
sion, the most difficult thing possible to keep. We are not Post-Impressionists and we must express
the honest conviction that they are going the wrong way about it. But it is not an incomprehensible
aim, and whether they turn out to be martyrs to an impossible ideal or leaders of a new and powerful
movement in art, they are trying hard to get away from the formulas that have satisfied a previous
generation, and they are entitled to that respect which always should be paid to the courage of
conviction. It appears to be necessary, moreover, that many should do forcibly the wrong thing
in art before one single person can do forcibly the right thing.
Mr. Harrington in the N. T. Herald:
Central Park, seen from a new angle, has been taken by Mr. Max Weber, a disciple of the
school of Post-Impressionism, as the model for one of the remarkable canvases which he is
exhibiting in the Photo-Secession Gallery, at No. 291 Fifth avenue. His viewpoint seems to have
been that of Mr. Roy Knabenshue when he soared over the park in his dirigible balloon. In a
guarded path may be seen a man, who appears of about the size that he would be if he were walk-
ing in the depths of the Grand Canyon. The work bears the name “Trees in Central Park.”
For those who cannot quickly embrace Mr. Weber’s advanced ideas in art there is a land-
scape called “Connecticut Hills,” which is pleasing from the point of view of old fashioned folk
who believe color and drawing are not fetiches. There are also several paintings of fruit which will
commend themselves to those who assimilate radical ideas in art more slowly than does Mr. Weber.

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