Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Heft 42-43))

tends to extend, as he tends to remove all limitations to his perception. Just as the simple
and direct perception of the outside world does not satisfy us any longer, and we try to go
deeper into the essence and quality of this simple perception, so have our feelings towards
nature become more complicated, and similarly the expression of these feelings.
The objective representation of nature through which the painter used to express the
mysterious feelings of his ego in front of his subject ‘motive’ no longer suffice for the fullness
of his new consciousness of nature. This representation bears no longer a relationship to his
new conception of life, and has become not only a limitation but a deformation. ‘The objective
representation of nature is a deformation of our present conception of nature.’
Reality imposes itself upon us not only under a special form but even more under a quali-
tative form.
For example: When we look at a tree we are conscious not only of its outside appearance
but also of some of its properties, its qualities, and its evolution. Our feelings before this tree
are the result of this knowledge acquired by experience through analysis; hence, the complexity
of this feeling cannot be expressed simply by objective and mechanical representation.
The qualitative conception of reality can no longer be expressed in a purely visual or
optical manner: and in consequence pictorial expression has had to eliminate more and more
objective formulae from its convention in order to relate itself to the qualitative conception.
The resulting manifestations of this state of mind which is more and more approaching
abstraction, can themselves not be anything but abstraction. They separate themselves from
the sensorial pleasure which man may derive from man or nature (impressionism) to enter
the domain of the pure joy of the idea and consciousness.
But expression means objectivity otherwise contact between beings would become im-
possible, language would lose all meaning. This new expression in painting is ‘the objectivity
of a subjectivity.’ We can make ourselves better understood by comparing it to music.
If we grasp without difficulty the meaning and the logic of a musical work it is because this
work is based on the laws of harmony and composition of which we have either the acquired
knowledge or the inherited knowledge. These laws are the objectivity of painting up to the
present time. The new form of painting puzzles the public only because it does not find in it
the old objectivity and does not yet grasp the new objectivity. The laws of this new convention
have as yet been hardly formulated but they will become gradually more defined just as musical
laws have become more defined and they will very rapidly become as understandable as were
the objective representation of nature. Therefore, in my paintings the public is not to look
for a ‘photographic’ recollection of a visual impression or a sensation, but to look at them as
but an attempt to express the purest part of the abstract reality of form and color in itself.
Photo-Secession Gallery, March, 1913. Francis Picabia.
EXHIBITION MARIUS DE ZAYAS
In the exhibition of his latest work, shown at “291 ” from March thirtieth
to the closing of the season, De Zayas revealed himself as one of the con-
temporary workers who have carried furthest abstract representation in
plastic expression. This distinction lies in the fact that in his abstract por-
traiture he expresses not the abstraction of his sensations in relation to the
object, but abstract characteristics of the person depicted. In other words, he
expresses objective abstraction instead of subjective abstraction. His con-
clusions in regard to his own work were embodied in an explanatory preface
written by him in connection with the exhibition. This preface we herewith
reprint in its entirety:
During my experience in the practice of caricature I have come to the conclusion through
experimental analysis, that the facial expression and the expression of the body of a man reveal

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