Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 40))

She does not mention their work or their ideas, what they are aiming at, or how they are
doing it. All she does is to try to do in words what they are trying to do in painting; or,
rather, not what they are trying to do in painting, but what their moods and deeper dreaming
consciousness is which leads them to do what they are trying to do in painting.
In this last paragraph, by the way, I have unconsciously, to a slight degree, imitated a
fragment of her style, as far as it involves repetition.
The reader of these two little essays would undoubtedly think them ridiculous, and this
no matter how intelligent he is. Perhaps, however, if he has had a good deal of sympathetic
acquaintance with Post-Impressionist painting, he may see that Miss Stein is at least making
an earnest experiment. He may permanently think she is unsuccessful in it.
But these two little things do call my attention voluminously to the fundamental character
of the emotional impulse, with what William James called the fringe of consciousness, which
dominates respectively Matisse and Picasso. They set us dreaming about the strenuous inner
life of these two artists, and convey the fringe or surroundings they are in as regards society,
and the broader human need.
They are intensely human, these little sketches. It is impossible to state what they say.
They say nothing. But they try to suggest and partly do suggest a complete and simple mood,
in which ideas, feelings, sensations, tendencies of the nerves, of hope, of the imagination are
indissolubly combined.
Supposing you had had an experience, say of love, and in an hour of spiritual repose and
contemplation, you were sitting in some soothing country place, your inner life all warm,
brooding, not thinking, conscious of your love, and conscious of the way it was associated with
nature, with work, with food, with the labor movement, with ambition, with life—just con-
scious of all this, vaguely, but not thinking about it.
Then if you were an artist and could hit upon some form, literary or plastic, in words or
in painting, which would be a projection into space of this inner, deeper mood with all its
“fringe” of suggestions, you would do what Miss Stein is trying to do in words, and what
Picasso and Matisse are trying to do in paint. Hutchins Hapgood.

OUR ILLUSTRATIONS
A LL the plates in this number of Camera Work are devoted to the work
/\ of Baron Ad. De Meyer, of London and Dresden. To the readers of
X _BlCamera Work De Meyer’s photography is not new; he therefore
needs no introduction; yet we feel that in this number the scope as well as
the character of De Meyer’s photography is for the first time adequately
shown. The fourteen photogravures were made from De Meyer’s original
negatives by F. Bruckmann Verlag, Munich. The credit for the quality of
the gravure work is due to Mr. Kaufmann, who is working under the direc-
tion of Director Goetz. Further comment upon the photographs and the
gravures is unnecessary.

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