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

a suggestive purpose. Many of them are like notes, tentative, hesitating, beckoning, or hinting.
Notes, no matter if they do not come to full realization, are not likely to be dull. There is
always hope for a note, for a suggestion.
And, of course, there is much more than the suggestion sketch in this exhibition. There
are a very large number of successful works of art there. And many of them are works of art
in the most vital sense. They enhance the lives of many people. They stir the emotions
and make us see things in nature and in human nature that we have not seen before. As a
friend said to me, when we were looking at the pictures together: “This is more than a picture
show. And one can learn here not only about art but about everything. It stirs us to think
about politics and industry and social relations and human values, fills us with a wonder as to
whether we may not be keener about all those things than we have been, whether we have not
been sunk in a dogmatic slumber.”
Soon after the opening of this exhibition I wrote an article called “Life at the Armory,”
in which I said that the thing that stood out boldly was the vitality of the thing as a whole.
One was struck with the fact that life was there, rather than art. And my first impression
remains stronger than ever. The intense thing about this whole affair of four weeks has been
the life, the vitality of it, the suggestiveness, the discussion, the general interest.
An artist told me on my last visit that this exhibition was the only event that had ever
made him want to live fifty years longer. We had been talking of the really wonderful way
in which the public had responded; the vital way. The intelligent crowds had taken these
painted canvases as life messages. Thousands of persons had approached these silent things
as if they were human temperaments, expressing their passionate convictions about experience.
They wanted to understand what these artists were feeling and thinking. They were not talking
about the technical art. They were talking about what the artists meant to say about life.
And the artist, who wanted to live fifty years longer, was moved by the sudden realization
that the public would respond to anything that is alive, even if it is art. He had his doubt of
the crowd removed, shattered. He had been made to realize that the only reason that art is
limited in its appeal is that, as a rule, there is not enough life in it.
To move about in those armory crowds and see the eager, vital faces, the range of types,
the curiosity, and the intelligence; the way in which the people merged into the pictures, as it
were, communicated with them, argued with them, compared life notes with them—this, indeed,
made one hopeful, made one expectant of all good things to come, made one trust democracy
and realize that the people will take even the best, if there is life in it. They are gloriously
uninterested in technical perfection. No matter how perfectly a painter observes the rules,
this does not interest anybody except the deadly academic and the academically dead.
So-called artists have complained that the people are not interested in art. What they
ought to say is that the people are not interested in death. Most of our exhibitions have been
huge morgues in which stiffened corpses have been shown in decorous and decent fashion.
But give the people life in art, and they like it, no matter how indecent, indecorous, lawless,
imperfect it may be.
There is a well-grounded distrust of the half-educated, of the half-experienced, of the half-
civilized. Artists who hate the middle-class, the “bourgeoisie,” hate it because it is “half.”
Authority in art is bad for that reason. Authority in morality and taste generally is bad for
the same reason. It is only half lived, half felt. This is the trouble with our Academy, with
our respectability, with our reform. They represent rules for and by people who do not under-
stand fully the meaning of life. And the vital public is rightly bored. It wants life and this
pseudo culture gives them death instead.
That is why a return to the primitive, to the simple, to the directly material, to crude
contact with nature, is so refreshing. It is inspiring to break through, not law, but laws.
Indeed, breaking rules and regulations often means, and always ought to mean, getting back to
law, to fundamental, natural law. We want now to break through the rules of our school
system in order to get more fully in touch with vital education. Breaking rules in favor of
fundamental law is the process of all real reform.
In this armory show there is evident this exciting demand to come again into the life
of art—to feel the fundamental functions of art, which is an expression of life in form. The

45