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

factor of destruction, of rebellion, of revolt, of lawlessness is only an attempt to break through
rules for the sake of law, to return to first principles, to the form instinct, to the instinct for form.
Of course there is always in such a renaissance movement grotesque abuses. Some artists
do not see or feel the fact that revolt is not for its own sake, but only a bi-product of simplicity,
reality, independence and courage. So in this show there is an element of the grotesque and
the extravagant without life. But this does not determine the main effect of the exhibition,
which is a vital, restless attempt to bring art back to life—to instinct, to feeling, to expression,
to personality.

Samuel Swift under the title of Art Photographs and Cubist Painting, in the
“N. Y. Sun”:
Broad as is the scope of the international art show at the armory on Lexington Avenue at
Twenty-sixth Street, it so happens that an exhibition now visible at the little gallery of the
Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth Avenue, supplements and explains rather fortunately certain
striking features of the larger assortment.
This is nothing less nor more than a display of photographs of New York made by Alfred
Stieglitz, some of them twenty years ago and some quite lately. Going back to 1892 you find
here a photograph entitled “The Terminus,” showing the changing of horses on the Third
Avenue cars, at the loop by the post office; another print dating from the same year, and one
that has been influential beyond expectation in pointing the way to expression through
photography, both here and in the Munich Secession, is a snow scene, “Winter on Fifth
Avenue.”
And so at intervals you get other glimpses of the city, with its Flatiron Building, its railroad
yards, its ferryboats and docks, the Mauretania putting out to sea, and finally the two towers
that keep watch over Madison Square, shown on a single plate.
But it is not the subjects of these photographs that alone make this little exhibition one
of the significant events of the art season. It is the lesson clearly enforced that photography,
even without the aid of any manipulation of plates or special arrangement of composition,
can represent actualities with something positive and undeniable in the way of expression.
Now turn to the international show at the armory. Look at the Cubist paintings by
Picasso and Picabia and Kandinsky. The farther they have been carried the less can you
find in them any representation at all of natural objects. And if you ask Francis Picabia, who
is now in this city watching our reception of the new way of seeing things, he will tell you
that he and his colleagues have abandoned representation, or the painting of objective things,
because photography has shown itself capable of doing that part of the work so much better.
“Why,” asks Picabia, “should we try any longer to record material facts about objects
or human beings in paint when the camera in the hands of an artist can tell them so well?
We must devote ourselves to setting down on our canvases not things but the emotions pro-
duced in our minds by things. We must be subjective. It is our own expression about what
we feel or see that will have vitality if it be worthy.
“The primitive painters felt this; they sought to register their own feeling about the things
or people they painted by knowingly changing, much or little, the forms of what they drew or
painted, until they differed from those they saw in nature. This difference measured the
artist’s own contribution, his expression. And now that representation by paint or by the
camera has progressed so far, the way in which we artists can best express what we feel is by
the purely subjective, by the abstract. That is what some of us are trying to do.”
Also, M. Picabia is ready to admit that the four pictures by which he is represented in
the International show, although recent in date, are much less abstract than what he is doing
to-day. “The Procession, Seville,” with its hieratic design and the curiously structural look
of its close packed units of shape and color, still indicates slightly the natural realities that
inspired it.
So, in greater measure, does his “Souvenir de Grimaldi, Italie,” with its hillside, its dis-
cernible houses and trees. “Paris” is almost realistic, compared with the painter’s present
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