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

interesting if not very new pictures on view. The average of excellence is high. (Arthur B.
Davies, who is so absolutely out of place as to be, artistically speaking, hors concours.) But the
poor lighting smashes all values and ends by getting on your nerves.
Mr. Davies is always chivalric, but he belongs in his own class, which is uniquely Davies.
A master draughtsman, he makes the rest of the black and white too minified for comparison.
And this is not fair, as truthfully speaking, the drawings are the best part of the exhibition. George
B. Luks, good old Grandpa George, has fifteen canvases, none new except the “Glowing Bowl.”
His work is veritably ancient in company with so much paint slashing and individual drawing.
But it is in line with the good old tradition which believed in humanity and a mellow style of
interpretation. Luks is not one of the new Uebermenschen. He is a solid painter and a poet who
loves the lowly, the simple of heart and also the humorous in life. But he is shockingly hung.
The strong man among the younger generation (that knocks) is Rockwell Kent, and Kent is no
stranger at academic functions. He is the only painter in the room save Davies and Maurer who
sends shafts of sunshine through his canvases. Homer Boss grows, so Julius Golz; we admired
the sketches of Guy Pene Du Bois, and his “Girl Sewing” is an ambitious effort full of atmosphere.
A talented young man this. Glenn Coleman is an illustrator who contrives to record in his drawings
the irony and misery of the East Side poor. Faithful to his elaborate tapestry, Maurice Prendergast
of Boston still woos and disconcerts the retina—but not the latter in his water colors, which are
delicious. The name of John McPherson is new to us. Not novel to us, yet always welcome are
the water colors of John Marin, evanescent notations of the real, informed with beauty, withal
Japanese in feeling. Alfred Maurer, another facile painter, who left the primrose path for the
stony road to Damascus, exhibits his flowers, poppies in bewildering coruscations and that superb
evocation of a table and chair almost pulverized by sun rays. Marsden Hartley completes the
list. If there is too much string and wood wind in the orchestra of The Ten, the brass and tympani
preponderate at the concert of the Independents. But they make stirring music, all the same.
Mr. Fitzgerald in an editorial entitled “The New Art Criticism,” in the
N. Y. Evening Sun:
Criticism by rule has long been out of fashion in the domain of art. The commentator
whose judgment in aesthetic affairs is forever tethered by laws and guided by tradition has fallen
into well-merited disrepute. We are tolerant enough of hypotheses as long as they serve a useful
purpose, but they must still be held lightly and never paraded as ultimate systems. No critic to-day
can impose upon us with established conditions or safely undertake to condemn any new thing
by an appeal to authority. A modern is at liberty to quote the lawmakers if he will, but not after
the manner of the older critics. A passage from Aristotle may at times be acceptable as a deco-
rative embellishment; in an aesthetic argument, however, it is about as conclusive as a passage
from Galen in a current treatise on therapeutics.
The disappearance of the dogmatist from the field of art is unregrettable and would be
wholly beneficial had not his place been taken by a new and equally pernicious sort of critic with
a method ostensibly the opposite of his. As the old sort undertook to judge things by comparison
with certain fixed standards, so the critic of to-day professes to expound them without any com-
parison at all, and with the least possible use of his own understanding. An inane humility is
the prime quality of the modern critic, as insolent assurance was of the earlier type. The very
word “criticism” is generally eschewed by him because it seems to carry a certain suggestion of
judgment. For this reason he prefers to call his discourses “appreciations,” and his whole endeavor
is to make them as spineless and impersonal as possible. Above all, he strives to eliminate the
least hint of opinion because opinion might possibly color and modify the thing he sets out to
interpret without prejudice.
Some drawings by a new painter, Pablo Picasso, have lately been brought to town by Mr.
Stieglitz, that enterprising maker of exhibitions to whom we are all so much indebted for keeping
us more or less informed of certain unfamiliar phases of art in other lands. It may be gathered
from the comments in the daily papers that for the most part our journeymen critics found Picasso’s
art wholly indigestible; but with their opinions we are not concerned. The official expositor
of the occasion is M. Marius de Zayas, the very type of modern critic. The paper he has written
for Camera Work is supposed to describe the art of M. Picasso, not as the critic sees it or under-
stands it, but in strict accordance with the conception and purpose of the artist himself.
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