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

something like a sort of accidental portrait of a human being made by a blot of ink between
sheets of paper. He portrays the soul, in these pictures, as a little pink “goop,” sitting astride
a white horse who is Pegasus, on Pegasus’s foal. On the horse the goop-soul flies over sea and
land and up to heaven and down to hell. Sometimes it is funny, and sometimes it is sad, and
generally it is both—like life. Mr. Burgess’s humor permeates the whole thing—except in the
representation of Passion. There is no humor here.
In his color, which is quite delicious, Mr. Burgess is conventional. No Hindoo mysticism.
Pink is joyous, crimson is vicious, blue vast and heavenly, yellow intensely emotional, and so on.
This color is always agreeable.
Some one has suggested an analogy between Burgess and William Blake. There is none.
Blake had no humor. His humor is generally subtly playful. Sometimes it is merely grim-
as when he pictures “Renunciation.” Renunciation leaves a blood-stained trail all over the
world and never gets anywhere; he has more heights ahead that must be scaled, though emo-
tion has ceased. We laugh at Renunciation.
But these highly imaginative pictures must be seen to be appreciated. They are sure to
be understood, because Mr. Burgess has explained them all in the catalogue. They will remain
at the Photo-Secession until December 8.

Henry Tyrrell in the “N. Y. World”:
As for the wild, weird things disclosed by Alfred Stieglitz at his Photo-Secession loft over
No. 291 Fifth Avenue—well, they represent the turkey trot, the grizzly bear and bunny hug
of pictorial art. This is no place for the placid, home-loving citizen who swears by Bouguereau
and the Barbizon landscapes, and whose favorite American genre painter is J. G. Brown.
Mr. Stieglitz has just put over the Arthur B. Carles show without police interference,
and will now defy the elements with Marsden Hartley. There are excuses for both these men.
Carles is a Philadelphian, so can you blame him if he is a bit rabid in his revolt against Quaker-
drab conventionality ? Poor Hartley has but recently escaped from the abandoned farms of
New England, and has to be humored in his mad, pessimistic moods of seeing things. No
doubt something might be said in extenuation of the various other extreme post-impressionists
and incorrigible cubists, such as De Zayas, Max Weber, Maurer, Marin, Manigault, Steichen
and Picasso, if we knew as much about them as Mr. Stieglitz does.
But he won’t tell. If these fellows were understood they would become commercialized,
and then all bets would be off. Some one might even begin buying their pictures—and Alfred
is taking no chances on that.
J. Edgar Chamberlin in the “N. Y. Mail”:
Mr. Stieglitz has at his Photo-Secession gallery the work of a man of much power—a
post-impressionist, naturally, and, somewhat less naturally, a Philadelphian. His name is
Arthur B. Carles, and we understand that he is a young man. Concerning his landscapes, his
fruit studies and certain of his more post-impressionist figure studies, we have nothing to say,
because they are beyond ordinary comprehension. But there are two or three compositions
which have upon them the mark of understandable thought, and of that quality of insight
that, when it moves us sufficiently, we cali inspiration.
The biggest of these things is a figure which the catalogue simply calls “Nude.” When
it left Mr. Carles’s hands we believe it bore another name. What that name was may be gath-
ered, perhaps, from these lines of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which came swiftly to mind when we
looked at the picture:
“And the still features thus descried
As Jenny’s long throat droops aside-
The shadows where the cheeks are thin,
And pure wide curve from ear to chin-
With RaphaePs, Leonardo’s hand
To show them to men’s souls might stand,
Whole ages long, the whole world through,
For preachings of what God can do.

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