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

standards, but “La Danse a la Source,” with its rhythmic lines and its vigorous color throbs,
approaches nearer to up-to-the-minute ideals of the Cubists.
Pablo Picasso, perhaps the leader of the Cubists in Paris, has here work in various stages
of thraldom to or emancipation from objectivity. He is a painter of force and ability. At the
extreme of his subjective range in this exhibition is a rather famous “Drawing” (No. 351),
happily left without other title, which was for a time shown in the Photo-Secession gallery.
It has been called a glorified fire escape, a wire fence and other sarcastic names. It is almost
pure pattern.. It is undoubtedly rhythmic in high degree. There is a curious fascination about
it. Based probably upon a human figure, it is still pretty thoroughly abstract.
Its owner, Mr. Stieglitz, declares in all sincerity that when he has had a tiring day in his
gallery or elsewhere he goes home at night, stands before this drawing in black and white, which
hangs over his fireplace, and gains from it a genuine stimulus. It is to Mr. Stieglitz a sort
of intellectual cocktail.
This drawing by Picasso, with the remarkable painting in Gallery G, the “Improvisation”
of the Russian artist Kandinsky, which represents nothing recognizable and is not intended to
do so, you would expect to mark the ultimate goal of this sort of abstract expression. But it
is stated credibly that Picasso to-day is doing things so far removed from this drawing that his
Paris dealer, who has followed him with enthusiasm through many stages, has become alarmed.
A jagged line or two in color across a canvas, with a few spots or blurs at either end or above
and below, now suffice Picasso to record a set of his emotions, and he is said to regard even this
drawing in the armory and its companions as no longer valid.
Next to this drawing is another by Picasso, a portrait of an old woman, in pen and ink,
done before he left accustomed paths. And next to this, in Gallery J, is a pair of wonderful
little portrait drawings by no less a man than Ingres. You are surprised to see how well
Picasso’s drawing holds its own. Verily, an artist who has deliberately struck out a new path,
after acquitting himself so well in the old ones, commands at least your respectful attention
in his new venture.
J. Edgar Chamberlin in the “N. Y. Mail”:
Mr. Stieglitz says that the purpose of his exhibition of his own photographs, at the Photo-
Secession, is to serve as a foil to the International Exhibition of Art, which is the opposite of
everything photographic. Its purpose is to convince the instructed observer that everything
that may be rendered at all by photography is already better rendered by photography than
it possibly could be by painting, and that the painters had therefore better devote themselves
to subjects and to methods which photography cannot touch—to futuristic pictures, in short.
However that may be, we must thank Mr. Stieglitz for showing the public so many beautiful
photographs. They are practically unsurpassable. They go back to his “Winter on Fifth
Avenue” and “The Railroad Terminus,” taken twenty-one years ago, which blazed the way for
a lot of artistic photography, and they come all the way down to “The Two Towers, New York,”
and “The City of Ambitions,” which represent the latest possibilities in the art of suggesting
great ideas with photography. In between there is a long list of splendid photographic studies,
belonging none the less to art for also belonging to photography.
Royal Cortissoz in the “N. Y. Tribune”:
The Photo-Secession Gallery is filled with photographs by Mr. Alfred Stieglitz. It is
interesting to see them there, but we cannot forbear noting that if any worker with a camera
might have claimed admission for his prints at the Salon of the Independents it is Mr. Stieglitz.
Visitors at the Armory, when they are studying Matisse and the rest, may well recall that it was
in the Photo-Secession Gallery that so many of the ‘revolutionaries’ were first introduced to
the New York public. With his delightful breadth of mind, his enthusiasm for liberty and all
those who fight for it, Mr. Stieglitz has been an exemplary pioneer. He, too, like Mr. Davies
and the other leaders in the Association of American Painters and Sculptors, has been content
to show new things on his walls and leave the spectator utterly free to judge for himself. His
liberality is a noble trait, and there is no better occasion than this one for offering it a public
tribute.

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