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

The best, or worst, of Picasso is not at this little exposition. Our objection to it and to
others of its kind (though we are grateful to Mr. Stieglitz for his unselfish impresarioship in these
affairs) is that such drawing and painting are only for a few artists. It is all very well to say that
the public will learn later to appreciate; we doubt it. It either gasps or mocks; sympathy it
seldom develops. To a vision like Picasso’s the external of the human form is only a rind to be
peeled away. At times he is an anatomist, not an analyst; the ugly asymmetry of the human
body is pitilessly revealed, but as a rule he abstracts the shell and seeks to give shape and expression
to his vision. Alas, nearly always do we shudder or else smile. Those inanimate blocks, kinder-
garten idols of wood and bronze, what do they mean ? You dream of immemorial Asiatic monsters
and also of the verses of Emile Verhaeren: “The desert of my soul is peopled with black gods,
huge blocks of wood”; or of Baudelaire’s spleen and ideal beauty: Je hais le mouvement qui
deplace les lignes; et jamais je ne pleure et jamais je ne ris. Benjamin De Casseres in his brilliant
summary of the poetry of Leconte de Lisle shows us the genius of immobility, and his description
would fit Gustave Moreau’s picture as well: “When he walked he left abysses behind him. Where
his eye fell objects relapsed into rigidity. There is no motion in his images. The universe is
static, all things are turned marble. Motion is spent. * * * Silence, impassivity, sterility,
France, in a few magical strokes the universe of living things, is caught in the sin of motion—
vibration is seized flagrante delicto—and stiffened in its multicolored shrouds. The organic and
inorganic worlds have stopped at high tide, turned to adamant as at the sudden vision of some
stupendous revelation.” Will Pablo Picasso restore form to its sovereignty in modern art ?
His art is not so significant as Moreau’s, yet with all its deformations, its simplifications,
the breath of life does traverse the design; as for his color we must imagine what it was formerly,
as Mark Twain’s German musical public loyally recalled the long time dead voice of their favorite
tenor. One Parisian critic accused Picasso of painting the portraits of anthropoid apes that had
been inoculated by M. Metchnikoff. Gracious Apollo! Is this irony? To paint a counterfeit
of a monkey, sick or otherwise, is sound art; certainly art of a more comprehensible character
than the divigations now at the Photo-Secession. Remember, if you go there your gibes and jeers
be upon your own head. We have only attempted to blaze the trail for you.
What havoc has been wrought by what Mr. MacColl calls the “camera vision” on our way
of seeing will be appreciated on entering the gallery of the Society of Beaux Arts Architects. There
is evidence there of more normal vision than at many an Academy show. Yes, this work of twelve
men who call themselves or have been erroneously called the Independents. We are tempted to
ask, “Independent of what ?” did we not recall—gooseflesh on our backs—the exhibition of last
season which bore the same title. At least this year’s show is independent of a lot of half baked
amateurs and immature students’ stuff, though such first class men as Robert Henri, Ernest
Lawson, Glackens, Sloan, Jerome Myers and a few others are absent. With politics in art we
are a little concerned; all politics as well as politicians belongs to the subterranean world, and
politics in matters artistic wears a peculiarly sordid aspect. If you don’t like the Academy then
cry out with George Luks, “Hang the Academy! I don’t need it!” Nor does any other good
artist. But don’t carry water on both shoulders and secretly seek the Academy while openly
reviling its ways. After all, the Academy is a pretty good picture shop. A big fellow can get along
without the Academy, and the Academy has as a rule managed to get along without the big fellows.
The first thing that occurs to you as you enter the gallery is, What vile lighting! We recall,
not altogether in a mood free from petty malice, the rude comments made when Senor Sorolla
y Bastida came to the Hispanic Museum. His success was at once set down to the ingenious
artificial lighting of his pictures. One might have supposed from the current criticism, made by
fellow artists, that Sorolla was a charlatan, who colored photographic snapshots and called them
“impressions,” instead of being an impressionistic painter of the first rank with an enviable
Continental reputation. To be sure, we better liked Ignacio Zuloaga, a liking that the general
public did not share. When we visited the Hispanic Museum, usually during the morning hours,
no lights were used, though in the afternoon they were. But only if the Independents had such
an ingenious system as that employed by Mr. Huntington! The general impression aroused is
of dull, muddy paint, blackest of shadows and a depressing absence of reverberating sunlight,
such as you find at the exhibition of The Ten in the Montross Gallery. Yet there are many
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