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

progressed to solid and spherical geometry, making the cylinder and the cone the bases of their
patterns. Now I find Picasso using cubes and crystals, the very elements of pictorial design,
and so arranging and expanding his crystals as to suggest natural forms and faces and figures.
No effort is made to present the actuality of appearances, yet the most striking impression of this
exhibit of experiments is the character and expression Picasso succeeds in imparting as he gropes
after a new and impersonal use of form.
In a sketch of Pablo Picasso, a Malagan living in the freer air of Paris, Marius de Zayas,
the caricaturist—also Picasso’s countryman—has explained some of Picasso’s aesthetic ideas.
“Picasso has a different conception of perspective from that in use by the traditionalists.
According to his way of thinking and painting, form must be represented in its intrinsic value
and not in relation to other objects. He does not think it right to paint a child in size far larger
than that of a man just because the child is in the foreground and one wants to indicate that a
man is some distance from it. The painting of distance, to which the academic school subordinates
everything, seems to him an element which might be of great importance in a topographical plan
or in a geographical map, but false and useless in a work of art.
“In his paintings perspective does not exist; in them there 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.
“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 medi-
tation 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.”
Rebels against tradition and respectability, these very modern men are trying to express
something in their own way. Whether anything will come of it, I don’t know. But the effort is
sincere and they deserve a hearing; from those even who can only laugh in the presence of their
work.
Mr. James Huneker in the N. Y. Sun:
Ten years ago Pablo Picasso arrived in Paris, having an excellent equipment with which to
conquer the world artistic. He was a superior draughtsman, a born colorist, a passionate har-
monist; he incarnated in his production the temperament of his Iberian race. Mr. Stieglitz will
show at the Galleries of the Photo-Secession a few drawings of that period; they are supple,
alert, savant, above all charged with vitality. Then the spirit of Henri Matisse moved across
the waters of his imagination, as did that of Debussy in the misty, wild regions of Ravel and Dukas.
To-day Picasso has surpassed his master in hardihood, as Matisse left lagging both Gauguin
and Cezanne, St. Paul the Minor and St. Paul the Major, in the rear. At the present he is exhib-
iting in the Galerie Volard, Paris, and critical commentary makes one gasp; he is either a satyr
or a Hyperion; there is no middle point in the chorus of execration and exaltation. We believe
this is wrong and makes for critical confusion.
In his recent illuminating address Mr. W. C. Brownell remarked that “every important
piece of literature, as every important work of plastic art, is the expression of a personality, and
it is not the material of it but the mind behind it that invites critical interpretation.” Precisely
so, though we do not believe that either to the reason or to the imagination of this distinguished
critic the pioneer Picasso would make much of an appeal. And even this opinion we put forth
diffidently, remembering that when the name of Rodin was still anathema Mr. Brownell had
written almost a book about the sculptor. Picasso is miles away from Rodin, yet he is striving
for a new method of expression, one that will show us his new vision of the powers and principalities
of the earth. (At present Satan is chanting the chief role in his composition.) It’s anarchic,
certainly; that’s why we tolerate it despite its appalling ugliness; anything is better than the
parrotlike repetitions of the academic.
What is meant by the new “vision” ? Why shouldn’t the vision that pleased our great'
grandfather content his great-grandchildren ? You must go to Stendhal for an answer. Because

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