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

problems, they have more of the genuine pioneer quality from which we may expect discoveries
that will stir the imagination.
In any new movement, however, are hundreds of frenzied spirits who lose their bearings
and go down before their legitimate goal is reached. One after another claims the moving epitaph:
A shipwrecked sailor buried on this coast
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant craft when we were lost
Weathered the gale.
Mr. Israel White in the Newark Evening News:
A little book lying on my desk has the simple, yet profound title, “What Nature Is.” Charles
Kendall Franklin, the author, goes pretty well to the root of things and offers a plausible theory
of the universe. He describes the solar system as beginning with a maximum amount of radiant
and a minimum amount of gravitant energy and effects a transformation of these two kinds of
energy “until, finally, after billions of years, the conditions are reversed and there exists the maxi-
mum amount of gravitant and the minimum of radiant energy.” Then the system collapses or
collides with another and the maximum amount of radiant energy is again developed; and all
the matter is once more distributed throughout the system and the process is begun over again.
We have not read far enough yet into this little book to see what applications the author
makes of his theory, but we have no doubt that, eventually, he will apply it to art. But, if we have
understood at all clearly what our most advanced contemporaries are doing, we imagine that he
will think a collapse or a collision has occurred and that the process of aesthetic development has
begun over again.
Surely no one will go to see Pablo Picasso’s pictures—if they can be so designated—at the
Photo-Secession Gallery, if he is in search of beauty. They cannot be criticized; for there are no
canons of art with which to judge them. Indeed, no attempt should be made to judge them.
They are simply experiments, attempts to carry the idea of the Post-Impressionists a step forward
and to build up a new artistic process. But as experiments they are exceedingly interesting and
no one who purposes to keep in touch with the flux of current thought and the currents of his
time can well afford to ignore them.
Hardly more than half a century has passed since Manet and the Impressionists were shaking
artistic Paris with their new ideas in paint. It has taken the world all this time to catch up with
and understand them; to realize that they, with their scientific use of color, were producing realism
such as the world had never seen. Through these intervening years they have learned to reproduce
the actuality of appearance in every difficult circumstance.
To this idea of producing “the actuality of appearance” the Orientals—mainly the Japan-
ese—contributed the idea that a picture is a decorative unit, and under the inspiration of Whistler,
the supreme purpose of art became decoration. Such a picture, for instance, as Whistler’s famous
“Falling Rocket” is distinctively a decoration. He set the fashion of naming his pictures sym-
phonies in pink and green, in this color and that, whatever they might be.
But it soon became evident that mere color harmonies do not satisfy the human spirit and
form came to be treated by the painters less for its actuality than as a symbol of expression. It
became the habit of their minds “to view the particular in relation to the general, to see the type
in the individual, to regard the personal and local as manifestations of the universal.”
“In his nocturnes,” Mr. Caffin wrote about Whistler, “forms lose their concrete assertiveness
and become as presences, looming athwart the infinity of spiritual suggestion.” To simplify, to
express essential qualities, to render abstractions, that was his purpose. How evident it is in his
lithographs and etchings with their wonderful abridgments and elisions! They indicate so little
yet suggest so much!
After Whistler, Cezanne. An exhibition of his water colors has just closed at this same little
gallery. They did more than strip to the naked hide; they showed the very marrow inside the
bones. Everything superfluous, incidental, particular, local, was left out. It was the very antithesis
of the detailed, elaborated art of, say, E. L. Henry and Meissonier.
I hardly need to say that the Japanese art, being so largely decorative, was geometrical in
its designs. Plane geometry, however, was as far as the Japanese went. Cezanne and his followers
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