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

But yet Maurer’s paintings have no poetry to me, and because of the immediate masterli-
ness and success. His sense of quick and complete realization has limited the depth of tem-
peramental vision, has cut off intensity of beauty, has shown a superficiality of feeling. He is
so successful in his workmanship that he leaves no hope and no doubt. I admire the fact that
he has done with skill and authority what he has done, but my interest flags in the emotional
substance, the real material of his act. The heart of art is poetry, and poetry is here lacking.
Perhaps there is a lack of deep artistic personality.
Something of the same, I think, may be said of Jo Davidson’s sculpture, with some im-
portant differences. Davidson, like Maurer, has quickly and cleverly caught in the new
feeling whatever can be quickly realized, whatever can be “ put over.” His instinct is the same
as that of a good actor who succeeds. He gets it over. His work ought to be popular. It is
interesting, and interesting in the “news” sense. He, too, has authority and definiteness, but
not so decided as that of Maurer.
But, on the other hand, Davidson’s work, to me, has greater real promise than that of
Maurer. In some of his work the modelling is really living, and therefore poetical. I feel that
Davidson has a personality and a temperament which is sometimes expressed plastically in
his work. It does not, as yet, reach the point where it is compelling because of depth and
intensity. As yet his skill and ability are more obvious than his vision and sense of beauty.
There is more of the real thing, to me, in his sketches than in his sculpture, in which there is
much that is tender, charming, and sensitive, though not in the more ambitious pieces.
It is to me a strange fact that some critics regard the work of men like Davidson and
Maurer as “ultra,” as abnormal, as marking great breaks from traditional art. It seems to me
that their divergence is slight, that they have quickly and sensitively caught the mood, the
atmosphere and some of the more workable details of the “movement” and have used them skil-
fully, but they do not convey to me the feeling of determined and powerful initiation.
The paintings of John Marin, however, do not belong in the same class. They seem to me
far less successful, less authoritative and more doubtful. But they also suggest greater hope.
They make me feel that there is a possibility here of a deeper success. One feels the element
of struggle more—that the painter is trying harder to realize a possibly more profound vision—
to project the more obscure things in his soul on to the canvas plastically. If he succeeds at
all, he probably will succeed more substantially. One feels that Marin is limited in life-
experience, and that the poetry for which he is obviously struggling may be narrow and
provincial, but it is poetry.
The artist that preceded Marin at “291,” Walkowitz, while revealing poetry and tempera-
ment in his work, seemed to have a wider sympathy with life. He seemed to be doing in a
different medium whatever any serious worker is doing in any medium in the different arts, or
in the arts of action, in the intensification of life itself. This greater relationship with all things
seemed to me one of the qualities that make Walkowitz’s work beautiful.
Here I come back again to my muttons. There seems a vague but real relationship be-
tween all the real workers of our day. Whether in literature, plastic art, the labor movement,
science, journalism, philosophy, wherever we turn and find something vital in form, we find a
common quality—we find an instinct to loosen up the old forms and traditions, to dynamite
the baked and hardened earth so that fresh flowers can grow.
It is this instinct to turn up the soil, so that through hardened surfaces of lifeless con-
ventionalities the simply humanly beautiful may again nakedly appear, it is this instinct that
is creating our interest. One function of the general interest is the agitation which means
education—agitation in art, as well as in labor, politics, and the whole field of our social life.

Hutchins Hapgood, "The Picture Show,” in the “N. Y. Globe”:
The art exhibition at the armory is over, leaving in the minds of many of us a lively regret
that the four weeks could not have been extended to as many months. In my case, at any rate,
every visit of the half dozen I was able to make started my imagination going in fresh channels.
Indeed, there are very few pictures in this exhibition which, whether good or bad from the point
of view of beauty, as of relationship with the best development of art, do not at any rate serve

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