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

each generation, whether for better or worse, sees the world anew, or thinks it does; at least it is
“different” in the Stendhalian sense. For a keener definition let us quote D. S. MacColl: “This
new vision that has been growing up among the landscape painters simplifies as well as complicates
the old. For purposes of analysis it sees the world as a mosaic of patches of color, such and such
a hue of such and such a tone of such and such a shape. The old vision had beaten out three
separate acts, the determination of the edges and limits of things, the shading and modelling of
the spaces in between with black and white, and the tinting of those spaces with their local color.
The new analysis looked first for color and for a different color in each patch of shade or light.
The old painting followed the old vision by its three processes of drawing the contours, modelling
the chiaroscuro in dead color, and finally coloring this white and black preparation. The new
analysis left the contours to be determined by the junction, more or less fused, of the color patches,
instead of rigidly defining them as they are known to be defined when seen near at hand or felt.
Its precepts were to recover the innocence of the eye, to forget the thing as an object with its
shapes and colors as they are known to exist under other aspects, to follow the fact of vision,
however surprising, recognize that contours are lost and found, that local color in light and shade
becomes different not only in tone but also in hue. And painting tended to follow this new vision
by substituting one process for three; the painter matched the hue and tone at once of each patch,
and shaped a patch on the canvas of the corresponding shape, ceasing to think in lines except as
the boundaries by which these patches limit one another.” Elsewhere MacColl also asserts that
the true history of man would be the history of his imagination. It would prove, we think, a more
stupendous undertaking than Lord Acton’s projected history of ideas.
For over a quarter of a century the Impressionists did cease to think in lines and modelled
in patches, but curiously enough the return to the academic, so-called, was led by the least academic
of painters, Paul Cezanne. Strictly speaking he was not a genius, though a far better painter
than his misguided follower (Cezanne’s own words), Gauguin, who, despite his strong decorative
talent, never learned how to handle paints as a master. Cezanne was for returning to the much-
neglected form. “Don’t make Chinese images like Gauguin,” he cried; “all nature must be
modelled after the sphere, cone and cylinder. As for the colors, the more the colors harmonize
the more the design becomes precise.” Cezanne is the father of the Post-Impressionists, and it
is a mistake to suppose that they are Impressionists with the “new vision” so clearly described
above by MacColl. They have gone on and consider the division of tones men, Monet included,
as old-fashioned as Gerome and Bouguereau. And as extremes meet the contemporary crowd
are primitives, who have a word of praise for Ingres but a hatred of Delacroix. They also loathe
Courbet and call the first impressionism mere materialism. Manet is “old hat.” To spiritualize
or make more emotional the line, to be personal and not the follower of formulas—Ah, mirage
of each succeeding artistic generation!—are the main ideas of this school, which abhors the classic,
romantic, impressionistic schools. It has one painter of great distinction, Henri Matisse; from
him a mob of disciples have emanated. Among the Americans are Weber, Maurer, Marsden
Hartley, John Marin and others.
Picasso is also one, but a disciple who has thrown off the influence of the master. He goes
his own way, which is the geometrical way. He sees the world and mankind in cubes or pyramids.
His ideal form is pyramidal. There is on view at the Photo-Secession Gallery the back of a giantess
corseted. Her torso is powerfully modelled; no dim hint of indecision here. The lines are pyr-
amidal. Tremendous power is in them. Obsessed by the Egyptians, Picasso has deserted his
earlier linear suavity for a hieratic rigidity, which, nevertheless, does not altogether cut off emo-
tional expressiveness. There are attitudes and gestures that register profound feeling, grotesque
as may be the outer envelope. He gives us his emotion in studying a figure. And remember
this is a trained artist who has dropped the entire baggage of a lifetime’s study to follow his beckon-
ing star. To set it all down to a desire to stir up philistia would be to classify Picasso as a madman,
for there are easier routes to the blazing land of reclame than the particularly thorny and ugly
one he has chosen. There is method in his wildest performances, method and at times achievement
even to the uninitiated eye. His is not the cult of the ugly for the sake of ugliness, but the search
after the expressive in the heart of ugliness. A new aesthetic ? No, a very old one revivified, and per-
haps because of its modern rebirth all the uglier, and as yet a mere diabolic, not divine, stammering.

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