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

But, of course, there must be technical means by which his soul-mood is rendered plastic,
by which his soul-mood is expressed. What are these technical means? In Picabia’s case
they are the arrangement of line and color in such a way as to suggest the equilibrium of static
and dynamic qualities, of rest and of motion, of mass and balance. His talk along this line
reminded me of Maeterlinck’s “Essay on Silence.” In that essay, Maeterlinck says that when
two people have something very profound and important, such as love, to communicate to each
other, they are silent, for words only express dramatic or perturbed, changing things, and not
the deeper and simpler moods of the soul.
Picabia attempts to give the purified results of experience by means of establishing an
equilibrium. This is to me very suggestive, for I find that any intense effort of expression in any
art means that by means of a few simple devices we suggest, rather than state, the spiritual picture
of our soul, and its wealth of unconscious detail. What William James calls the “fringe of con-
sciousness” is suggested by these simple devices. And it is this “fringe” that gives expression.
The attempt of art is to make us dream, as music does. It expresses a spiritual state, it
makes that state real by projecting on to the canvas the finally analyzed means of producing
that state in the observer. I have stated what Picabia’s means are. Other artists have other
means. Those means are what Picabia calls “style.” It is through his style that the artist
expresses his soul.
An artist might think well, might understand thoroughly what he was attempting to do,
and yet not be able to do it. Picabia showed me his most recent work, and I felt that, in part,
he was successful in doing what he was attempting, but only in part. Mainly he is still experi-
menting. And yet I did feel, or half feel, that his work, devoid almost entirely of the repro-
duction of external objects, did succeed, at least some of it, in suggesting to me what the total
result on his mood was of a complex of life experiences, including experiences he had had with
external objects such as men, women, pastures, skyscrapers, and automobiles, although those
objects were not on the canvas.

Wm. B. McCormick in the “N. Y. Press”:
And now Marius de Zayas has got it, quite the worst case on record. By this we mean
an attack of the prevailing disease for the fantastically obscure in art. You may see what
this worst case is like in the tiny room of the Photo-Secession Gallery until May 20, where a
group of eighteen caricatures, “absolute and relative” as the catalogue says, are now on view.
Some of these caricatures are to be encompassed by the normal eye and understanding as in
the instances of those of Charles Darnton—who for some reason is represented without nose,
eyes or mouth, although in life those members of his make up a handsome countenance; Picasso
and Frank Haviland, Rodin and Steichen and Marin and Stieglitz.
But the chief interest, or disgust, will be aroused by some other “drawings” as we should
call them in our old-fashioned, simple, “unintellectual” way, although the catalogue calls them
caricatures and the owner of the gallery, who acts as cicerone, styles them “expressions.”
Possibly we all should get on faster in appreciating this art of the future if its practitioners
and disciples would agree on a terminology and stick to it. That, of course, would simplify
things, but evidently simplicity is not a desirable quality in this “new art.”
To attempt to describe these new caricatures in words is not easy, unless one has devoted
much of his youth, and with considerable success, to the study of trigonometry and algebra.
For example, the caricature of Roosevelt that is shown here consists of a black-and-white
design that resembles the pattern of a backgammon board or a row of dunce’s caps along the
top of the composition, below which are two rows of vertical writing exercises divided by an
oblong bar of black. The one of Arthur Hoeber certainly looks like a black egg cut off at one
end to stand on a plinth with a dark circle near the upper edge of the egg and two lines in the
manner of eyebrows below this larger eye, that suggest the disfigurement of Wotan. Below
the egg, if we may call this superintellectualism by such a mundane term, is an alleged algebraic
formula that reads, “a equals ab equals minus be equals minus cd equals minus D.”
Now, Hoeber is an honest, simple painter-man, whose life and whose work resembles
neither Wotan’s favorite pursuits, nor an egg, nor an algebraic problem. Possibly he can

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