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

sincerity. One feels in his work a personal temperament of genuine charm, which, if he can
develop his form to an adequate degree, will result in something wholly lovely.
The East Side exhibition is a mixture, as far as art tendencies and schools and tempera-
ments go. Weber has several canvases there, also. Samuel Halpert’s pictures, especially that
called “Street in New York,” definitely suggests the post-impressionist tendency—an intense
preoccupation with form in color and line and a neglect of the vaguely impressionistic. Weber
and Halpert are the only two painters at the exhibition who represent the post-impressionist
school. Jo Davidson, the sculptor, has a few busts generally attaching to the spirit of this
tendency—though Davidson’s felicitous and personal temperament does not strike me as
strenuous. He is more artistically gifted than he is intellectually serious.
A. Walkowitz, who reminds me in his honesty and his subjects of the East Side lads
who fifteen years ago were passionately occupied in rendering on canvas the East Side life
and types, has a number of sincere and personal paintings and drawings. The work of H. A.
Mathes shows that he is a clever and accomplished painter of the now old impressionist school.
Victor D. Brenner has some exquisitely worked medallions. The well-known artists, George
Luks and Jerome Myers, on whom I do not need to comment, are represented at this East Side
exhibition. Last, but not least, in the order of mention, is Bernard Gussow. He has made, of
recent years, great technical advance, and he shows strongly classical tendencies. His work is
conventional, but not on that account to be neglected. I feel doubtful, however, whether as
yet he has attained anything very personal to himself or his viewpoint.

J. Edgar Chamberlin in the “Evening Mail”:
Mr. Stieglitz has something new at the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth Avenue, in the paint-
ings of Arthur G. Dove. Mr. Dove, who has been an illustrator along somewhat conventional
lines, is another of the young American artists who have seen a new and strange light, and
have come out with something absolutely original and quite incomprehensible. But whether
Mr. Dove is comprehensible or not, there is an extraordinary fascination about some of these
decorative squares which he calls paintings. In color they are beautiful and strange, and the
eye returns to them again and again as if with delight in finding something which it is not
required to understand at all, but which is intrinsically agreeable.
Mr. Dove paints in patterns, but he does not scorn to borrow his pattems from nature.
This picture consists in a design of boats* sails; that one of steep roofs seen out of a window;
that one, of the fronds of iilies, or agaves; and so on. And all are combined in a charming
decorative way. Here is a strange picture which seems to have, at the right, a large blue
comma; on the left is a great purple comma; and then some upward-pointed horns of light
blue, dark blue and other colors. What is it all about? No one can tell—and yet the result
is singularly agreeable. It makes us feel as we felt when we were six years old, and gazed
through a kaleidoscope—turning it slowly around and around and delighting by the hour in
the formation of glittering shapes that were unlike anything on earth or in the sky or under
the earth—the weirder and more unreal the better.
We should not be surprised if it turned out that Mr. Dove has developed a valuable
decorative hint in these pictures.
Arthur Hoeber in the “N. Y. Globe”:
One has to be at it these days in order to keep pace with the men of the new artistic
movements. What with the followers of Matisse, the Picassos, the Cubists, the Futurists, and
others, one is lost in speculation as to where it will all end. Now comes forward a man with
still new notions as to what are the things to put on canvas, and this last to arrive on the scene
is Mr. Arthur Dove, who in his time was one of the leading illustrators, with a charming notion
of the humorous, a rational view of humanity, and an altogether delightful draughtsman who
previously depicted the follies of present-day men and women. Alas, he has now entered the
lists as one of the new movementors, and weird and astonishing are the results of his researches.
One thing, however, is to his credit. He does not travesty humanity, the landscape, or still
life; on the contrary, he seeks to present patterns, and offers a scheme of color with these that,
while not appealing to the present reviewer, is at least less objectionable than that of his con-

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