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

of idealization or typification, the long flight
of experiences that were stored
up in his memory. The classic composers worked very much the same
way. Now they seem to have reversed the method.
The modern composers in their minutely wrought art (I now speak of music
forms) seem to use these experiences for a sequence of pictures within
pictures, that only in their totality produce an effect, similar to the one
produced formerly by a profound leading theme,
worked out with mathematical precision.
And the final appreciation of these broken melodies lingers more vaguely in
our mind; it is not necessarily transformed into clear thought.
This style is less suitable for pictorial representation. Only minor
artists indulge in the delineation of personal moods or snapshot obser-
vations. Whistler, broadly speaking, could not work any differently
than Rembrandt or Praxiteles. Whistler endeavored to give in the iden-
tity of one night the whole range of his experience as an observer of color,
tone and atmosphere. Painting, capable only of one perma-
nent expression, all paint-forms being palpable and limited, is dependent on
a concentration of impressions, of real and fresh impressions no matter
of what import or how curiously obtained that reset themselves and
amalgamate in the finished work. This is merely a difference in technique.

The true fragmentary spirit—controlled at will—of leaving certain things
unsaid, of appealing to the imagination to solve the problem, is denied to the
painter and sculptor as little as to the composer. It may be expressed in
painting by a wilful archaism by analysis of form to its
fundamental shapes by atmospheric suggestiveness
by dissonance of color and contrast
and by manifold touches of unreality which
open up

purely visionary places
latent with those unseen forces that control all visible facts and outward quali-
ties. It is a new view of the beauty of life, or a new view point of regarding it.
Sadakichi Hartmann.

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