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

Arthur Hoeber in the “N. Y. Globe”:
Forsaking momentarily the exploitation of the men of the new school in painting and
sculpture, Mr. Stieglitz of the little galleries of the Photo-Secession gives himself over to
plain photography, in which field he stands almost alone as an artistic exponent. He offers
some thirty examples, a retrospective show of his work, as it were, dating back as far as fourteen
years ago, with his now famous ‘Winter on Fifth Avenue/ and his ‘Gossip, Katwyk,’ both
distinguished compositions in which the possibilities of the camera in the hands of an artistic
man are fully realized. Of course these are the visualized things of nature, as the man in the
street is likely to observe them, just good old nature, with some reasonable construction, draw-
ing, form, and all that sort of thing.
There has been no deep research after inner consciousness and the significance of life.
They are just snapshots of good old mother nature as she is, and you do not have to grab your-
self to make out what it is all about. It is all these, and he who runs may read.

Samuel Swift in the “N. Y. Sun”:
If the observer wishes to take seriously the group of water-color paintings by Francis
Picabia, which purport to be the graphic reaction of the French Cubist to the sights and sounds
of New York and of his recent voyage hither and have just been placed on view at the little
gallery of the Photo-Secession, he may regard them as being made up of the symbols of a
new language of the eye.
It seems that Arthur Dove, the radical young American painter whose strange patterns,
some of them decidedly handsome in color and not without formal beauty, were shown at the
same gallery last season, came into the sanctum of Alfred Stieglitz, which is the little gallery
above referred to, at 291 Fifth Avenue, while the new studies by Picabia were being placed
upon the walls a day or two ago. He beheld what will be to most visitors certain cabalistic
signs, narrow oblong upright patches of color, penetrating the viscera of several of these Cubist
paintings. They conveyed to him as definite a meaning, in terms of emotion, as any formula
might have done that had been already accepted the world over.
Why? Because Dove himself, working independently, as Mr. Stieglitz will tell you, and
evolving these symbols out of his inner consciousness, utilized similar modes of expression a
year ago. If you wish evidence Mr. Stieglitz will produce the actual canvases from under his
shelf. Yes, there they are. And while Mr. Dove was looking at Picabia’s cryptograms the
Frenchman was confronted without warning with what Dove, of whom it is probable that he
had never heard, had done. Recognition followed as quickly as though two persons born
with strawberry marks upon their arms had suddenly discovered the fact.
It is a large order, this building up by a few artists of a new language all by themselves.
As the ordinary visitor looks about him he will not be likely, even with the aid of the catalogue
and of M. Picabia’s clearly printed titles upon the top of his pictures, to perceive the relation-
ship of the graphic result to the emotional cause. There are three drawings in black and white,
each called “Study for a Study of New York,” in which it is possible to divine the prows of
steamships projecting from wharves with a background confusedly architectural or a suggestion
of crowded figures among buildings. But these are only the preliminaries. The studies that
cover the wall in water-color are the second stage, and perhaps Picabia, after he has returned
to Paris, will summarize these multitudinous impressions and expressions in a few large canvases,
compositely setting forth what New York has meant to him.
But the present studies, with their curious shapes, some of them rhythmic in aspect, even
to one outside the charmed circle (or is it only a triangle?), and their geometric patterns,
energized and volitional in high degree. What can one make of them? Here you find one
that is called “Chant de Negre.” It is a symphony, or perhaps a folk song, in whites and
browns and purples. Picabia did not know, it seems, that purple was the favorite color of
most negroes, but as he has told Mr. Stieglitz, who afterward conveyed this fact to him, purple
was the inevitable and dominating hue that sprang to the Frenchman’s consciousness when he
heard the song of the darky.
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