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

clever students could obtain an equally dexterous swish-in of color. There are other drawings,
in front of which the present writer was unable to make out the intention, mistaking a landscape
for a branch of blossoms until corrected by the ever-cheerful cicerone, Mr. Stieglitz. However,
in these galleries, one must start out to find certain things, and then only, with the aid of a powerful
imagination, duly prompted by the guide, and an utter subordination of all one’s preconceived
notions of nature, one may arrive somewhere, as long as the hypnotic influences of these agreeable
rooms prevail, for the Photo-Secession’s offerings are an acquired taste, an obsession, as it were,
for the full enjoyment of which one must be of the cult. Mainly the present display seems like a
Barmicide feast. You are solemnly told of the beautiful qualities present, of the lovely things
to see, and you look—but, alas! in vain. To the man hungry after art they fail to supply nutrition;
on leaving you have your appetite still with you!
Mr. Rockwell in the Brooklyn Eagle:
The art of the Post-Impressionist, Cezanne, about which Europe is talking, may be seen
for the first time in this country at the Photo-Secession Galleries, 291 Fifth avenue, Manhattan,
where twenty examples are on the walls. As the water colors have no backgrounds and as the
brush seems to only have swept the paper, in some cases, the first impression is that the pictures
are marvelous for delicacy, lightness of atmosphere, suggestiveness and simplicity. Any one can
admire the way Cezanne painted “A Curtain of Trees,” and such examples as “Chestnut Tree,”
“Tree Trunks,” “Hortensia” (hydrangea) and washerwomen at work at one end of a flatboat
on a river, as well as “The Fountain,” with deeps of forest opening behind it. But to ordinary
eyes the landscapes seem to be on the point of disappearing from the paper. To show how Cezanne
is considered abroad, this, by Roger Fry, in the current Burlington Magazine may be of interest:
“ Cezanne’s work, ‘Les Maisons Jaunes,’is in a very different category. Without any reminiscences
of the classic tradition of France, Cezanne is, in fact, one of the most intensely and profoundly classic
artists that even France has produced, and by classic I mean here the power of finding in things themselves
the actual material of poetry and the fullest gratification for the demands of the imagination. Certainly
nothing at first sight could appear more banal, more trivial, less worthy of an artist’s deliberate care than
the little wayside scene in the South of France which Cezanne has taken for his motive. A short strip of
road crossing a small gully and turning the edge of a hill by some houses which are without any picturesque
interest, a few trees, telegraph posts, the slope of a wooded hill, and the sky beyond—there is the material,
in itself so matter-of-fact and apparently insignificant, out of which Cezanne’s magic art distils for us this
strange and haunting vision. The composition, apparently accidental and unarranged, is in reality the
closest, most vividly apprehended unity. Out of these apparently casual rectangular forms, from the play
of a few bare upright and horizontal masses, a structure is built up that holds the imagination. To the
inquiring eye new relations, unsuspected harmonies continually reveal themselves; and this is true no less
of the subtle, pure and crystalline color than of the linear construction of the pattern. In the history of
painting one comes but rarely upon pictures which have, like this, an inevitable unity that baffles all analysis
and explanation. However different this may be in the absence of all direct suggestion of romantic imagery,
it has for me at all events something of the fascination, something of the inexplicable mystery of Giorgione’s
‘Tempest.’ The building of a design upon horizontal and upright lines is a task that has rarely been
successfully accomplished, but when, as here, it has been achieved, the result is of surpassing beauty.
Cezanne has produced many landscapes of more striking and obvious beauty than this, but few I think
which reveal more truly the intensity and the spontaneity of his imaginative reaction to nature.”

Mr. Arthur Hoeber in the N. T. Globe:
Pablo Picasso is his name and he is the high priest of the Post-Impressionists, so we learn,
the guiding spirit and the inspiration of that band of innovators in Paris who are holding the
limelight of the artistic scene. When there came to us from the Photo-Secession Gallery, through
Mr. Stieglitz, a circular by Marius de Zayas, beginning with the statement that he did not believe
in art criticism, then we feared the worst. Those people who really care little for criticism maintain
a discreet silence! It is the person who, with a flourish of trumpets inveighing against public
print, makes the strongest objections when the newspaper ignores him. Also when it becomes
necessary to explain pictures by vague words and protests it is a certainty that the work needs
all the assistance literature can give it. So, when we are told that “Picasso seeks in form the
psychic one (manifestation), and on account of his peculiar temperament his psychical manifes-
tations inspire him with geometrical sensations,” and that he “does not limit himself to taking
from an object only those planes which the eye perceives, but deals with all those which according
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