Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 37))

NOTES ON THE EXHIBITIONS AT “291”

THE BURGESS WATER-COLORS.
The first exhibition of the season 1911-1912 consisted of water-colors by
Gelett Burgess and came as somewhat of a shock to such visitors to the Photo-
Secession Gallery as expect to find there a new trail blazed to that Holy Grail,
the art-form of the Future. Some day, perhaps, people will learn not to expect
to find the expected at “291.” The “Little Galleries” have not yet fallen into
that rut. Nor does the Director believe that there is or should be one form
of art for all men.
The rooms of “291 ” were given to the work of Mr. Burgess for the three
opening weeks of the season, not because his work exemplified a new expression
of art, but because, mainly literary as Mr. Burgess himself confesses it to be,
it represented a new expression of an individual point of view in pictorial
literature. But we will let Mr. Burgess explain his own aim, and to that end
reprint his introduction to the catalogue of his water-colors, “Essays in Sub-
jective Symbolism”:
“That these water-colors are devoid of any pretensions to technique will,
it is hoped, prevent their being considered or criticized strictly as paintings.
Whatever their accidental effects of charm, of preciosity, or even of seemingly
deliberate crudity, they are naif and sincere, being offered mainly for their sug-
gestiveness in a comparatively new field of thought. Their appeal is only to the
intellect, and they do not shrink from the accusation of being ‘merely literary.’
“Nor, even in that friendly interpretation, do they lay claim to any
definitive aesthetic analysis. They are but personal and intimate attempts, in
whimsical spirit, to render in graphic form some interpretation of the pose of
the mind under stress of certain emotions.
“Their main intention is to portray the subjective aspect of what has,
heretofore, usually been represented only objectively. Symbolism, when
graphic, has, for the most part, concerned itself with draped figures, with
cog-wheels, scrolls and globes. It has offered in concrete form an effect, rather
than a cause of mental attitude. The present attempt to depart from that
custom depends upon the assumption that emotional or aesthetic moods are
more akin to natural forms of landscape than to costumes or geometrical
apparatus; that, in short, the personification of any mood fails to suggest
or recreate the subject-impulse in the mind of the beholder.
“The mind or soul being an abstraction, it has been here represented by an
abstraction, a conventional symbol rather than by a human figure; and the author
has endeavored to show, by the relation of this ego to its environment, some pic-
turesque analogy to the action of the mind under the dominance of the emotions.
“If the result may too easily be considered as grotesque, none the less
is the process aesthetic. The humorous vision will illuminate the fact that
these essays are superficial, not to be taken wholly seriously. Yet no humor
can ring with conviction unless it is founded upon the verities of life. Sug-
gestion is often more stimulating than definition, and, to those desirous of the
light, truth does not always have to be couched in the solemn form.
, Gelett Burgess.”
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