Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 38))

After thinking of some of the things that Matisse and Picasso have done
I thought that all seriousness is a defect of vision. It is quarry for Fate
and Fury. There is no form of seriousness, even in art, that has not in it the
germ of disaster for the mind that is a slave to it. It is the soul of tragedy,
the protagonist of every emotional and mental ill that besets the human
being. There is something in seriousness that runs counter to the spirit of
things. No ideal is complete until you have smashed it. No art is perfect
until the creator of it has caricatured it. Do not affront the God of Careless-
ness! In a universe that wavers and totters and flows and blends, that melts
and reappears eternally, Seriousness attempts the static pose. It tries to
stanch motion by predicating a cohesive finality. Before an imponderable,
riant god it assumes a cumbrous avoirdupois. There is a hidden diabolism,
Puck-like, in this New Movement. Will the bright employe of the Wall
Street Edition take it all too seriously?
Has Matisse, has Picasso, has De Zayas whispered into the ear of his
generation what Satan whispered into the ear of St. Anthony, “Suppose the
absurd should be true?” The absurd has an inexorable logic; it is the mother
of irony and the wing of Perception and the Cain-brand on the forehead of
every new movement. There is life itself to prove the supremacy and legit-
imacy of the absurd.
Why should the dreamers and thinkers and painters of the Other Plane
despise this age we live in? this— age of shreds and pasteboard, of super-
ficialties and stupidities, of inanities and material prosperity? Has it not
given to us the divine ironists, the supreme haters, the mockers, the merry-
andrews of art? Has it not given to us the disequilibrated geniuses of destruc-
tion, the pessimistic analyzers and dissociaters of all the humbug done under
the sun in the name of classicism ? Out of the entrails of this disorderly age
have come Thomas Hardy, Swinburne, Baudelaire, Rodin, Monet, Cezanne,
Manet, Schopenhauer, Whitman, Nietzsche, Verlaine, Debussy, Wagner,
Matisse, Picasso, Carlyle, Bloy, De Maupassant, Remy de Gourmont, Redon,
Geiger, Anatole France, Marinetti, James Huneker, De Zayas, Maeterlinck,
Jules Laforgue, Arthur Symons, Hauptmann, Sudermann, Tolstoi, Ambrose
Bierce. It is a glorious age and a glorious anarchic world of color, motion,
vibration and scintillating creative-destructiveness! We have made our
wounds sing, and sometimes we have put a tongue into them and made them
spit out the venom in our souls. We have drawn the unguents of ideal beauty
and the acids of healthy mockery from our sores. Blessed be the devil of
material progress! It stands forever redeemed in Ibsen’s venom and the
diabolic spleen of Felicien Rops.
There is a kind of mind that grows more beautiful the closer and the more
continued its contact with the ugly. It is the kind of mind that grows in
direct contrast to physical and economic development. It becomes stronger
through an enkernelled principle of revolt and dissent as it comes into contact
with the things that tend to weaken it. It is the revolt of the cell against the
organism. It is the root-principle of genius, of ironic genius and spleen-
genius.
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