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

Here is an artist who disregards all formulas of art—that is, as practised by the tradition
alists—and here if one chooses they can be enlightened by a lesson in the last word of Post-Impres-
sionism, which is so much in vogue abroad just now.
“In his paintings perspective does not exist; in them are nothing but harmonies suggested
by form and registers which succeed themselves, to compose a general harmony which fills the
rectangle that constitutes the picture,” says Marius de Zayas, who is evidently an ardent devotee
of the art of Picasso.
The studies of Picasso are indeed rectangular. Some of his figures suggest the early Egyptian
type, and have been executed without any consideration of draughtsmanship. In fact, correct
drawing does not appeal apparently to Picasso, who according to de Zayas gives synthetic expres-
sion of his emotions in his compositions.
Among the studies one can, by power of imagination perhaps, make out here and there
a figure. Here are fantastic shapes, and one drawing in particular which suggests a fire-escape.
Picasso has outrivalled the insurgents in his art, and after a visit to this ultra-impressionistic
show one can return to the Independent exhibition with greater appreciation.
Mr. B. P. Stephenson in the N. Y. Evening Post:
The latest word in Post-Impressionism has reached the Photo-Secession Galleries, No. 291
Fifth avenue. The speaker thereof is Pablo Picasso, a Spaniard by birth, who sought Paris
because, to quote Marius de Zayas from an advance proof of Camera Work, there “art has
succeeded in conquering an independence which permits all sorts of attempts at new expression.”
This Picasso attempt at new expression confounds us even more than the earlier ones seen at
the Photo-Secession. We will not go so far as a physician, brother of Alfred Stieglitz, owner of
these galleries, who, when he saw the Max Weber pictures, said: “ Why, these fellows are
suffering from paresis and I will bring a noted alienist to prove it.”
It may be our own brains are “out of gear.” At latest advices the alienist had not arrived—
“too busy looking after other sane persons,” as Stieglitz remarked—so we had not a chance of
proving whether the generally persuasive Alfred or the writer was better fitted to seek Blooming-
dale. The worshippers of Picasso say they feel sensations over what has been cleverly described
as his “emotional geometry,” and having forgotten most of their geometry since they left school,
are bent on studying it again to find out by what process their sensations are produced. But they
do not seem to understand whether Picasso begins with a geometrical sketch and ends with an
unexplainable painting, or begins with the painting and ends with a turbulent mixture of cones
and cubes. The writer heard two of Picasso's interpreters, who raved over the sensation his work
produced, discussing which was the beginning and which was the finished product of four studies,
the unexplainable figures or the geometrical confusion. They feel sensations, too, over a crayon
drawing that looks to anybody who does not understand “emotional geometry” like a design for
a fire-escape, and this is no exaggeration. They feel sensations over a horribly drawn lay figure,
a girl with a nose clumsily cut from a block of wood standing at an angle of about thirty degrees
across an almost full face, one side of which has been twisted out of joint. But let them have the
last word: De Zayas, having explained that in Picasso’s works no perspective exists, that in them
“ are nothing but harmonies suggested by form and registers which succeed themselves to compose
a general harmony which fills the rectangle that constitutes the picture,” writes:
Those who have studied Egyptian art without Greco-Roman prejudices know that the sons of the
Nile and the desert sought in their works the realization of [an ideal conceived by meditation before the
mysterious river and by ecstasy before the imposing solitude, and that is why they transformed matter
into form and gave to substance the reflection of that which exists only in essence. Something of this sort
happens in Picasso’s work, which is the artistic representation of a psychology of form in which he tries
to represent in essence what seems to exist only in substance.
Mr. J. Edgar Chamberlin in the Evening Mail:
The limit of esoteric anti-traditionalism has certainly been reached in the pictures by Pablo
Picasso, a Spaniard domiciled in Paris, which are shown at the Photo-Secession Galleries. Perhaps
we might call this work ultimate-Post-Impressionism; the force of anti-traditionalism can surely
go no further.

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