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

When I think of de Zayas I am reminded of one of the favorite stories of my childhood, Hans
Andersen’s “The Ugly Duckling.”
A swan’s egg, you remember, found its way into a setting of ducks’ eggs, and when the
mother duck had hatched it out she was shocked at the anomaly. Having only a duck’s experi-
ence and imagination, she was embarrassed and outraged at this violator of duck conventions
and treated the intruder at first with indifference and then with neglect.
It is true that de Zayas is employed as a caricaturist on a daily paper, but under circum-
stances that do not permit him properly to prove his mettle. Meanwhile, when he works in
the liberty of his own genius, he produces caricatures that not only for beauty of line, but also
for life of line and meaningful expression, and for choiceness of tone and a seemingly in-
exhaustible variety of creativeness, it would be hard to parallel in the graphic art of any country
to-day.
But as a community we are shy and sensitive about caricatures; while, notwithstanding our
belief in our sense of humor, we are apt to be as lacking in humor as the Irish patriots who
resented Synge’s “ Playboy of the Western World.”
In fact, the trouble at bottom is that we are very chary in permitting ourselves the luxury
of indulging our imaginations. Accordingly, the scope and independence of de Zayas’s imagina-
tion embarrass us.
In the present exhibition he shows a few examples of those inimitable stenographic records
of a personality, immediately recognizable, if you are familiar with the individual’s appearance,
and shrewdly suggestive of his characteristics. They show an increasing mastery of the
abstract use of line.
Thus a zig-zag, which would convey no meaning by itself, becomes, by association with
and in relation to other symbols employed, the vivid indication of a brow, an eye, and curve
of the cheek.
In his other exhibits de Zayas has gone beyond this point of abstraction. There is no
longer any optical suggestion of personality. The latter is interpreted purely by algebraic
formula and by geometric forms that express their significance not only by their shape, but
also in their relations to one another within the rectangle of the frame.
De Zayas disarms criticism by asserting that these caricatures “are not art, but simply
a graphical and plastic synthesis of the analysis of individuals.” Indeed, my own impression
of them is that they are caricatures of the “New Evolution in Plastic Expression.”
While others have amused themselves with the easy stunt of caricaturing the obvious
externals of the work of the extremists, de Zayas, who is a thinker and student, has analyzed
the psychology of their purpose and achievement; and discovered both its possibilities and
impossibilities.
The fundamental impossibility, as he sees it, is that concrete thought cannot be expressed
exclusively through abstract symbols. What happens if you logically carry out the exclusive
use of abstract symbols is shown in these caricatures. They are a reductio ad absurdum of
the principles of the Extremists. They may be sciences, but they are not art.
Samuel Swift in the “N. Y. Sun”:
Not long ago the public’s curiosity was aroused by the assertion that the physical weight
of the human spirit, the veritable spark of life, had been ascertained by observations made
at the bedside of a dying man. This feat has now been outdone, it seems, by the artist-analyst
Marius de Zayas, whose cartoons, so called, which are on view at the Photo-Secession gallery,
purport to chart not only the souls of certain persons named in his catalogue but their operative
value in connection with their attached physical bodies and also their paths, or trajectories,
through life.
Rather a large order, you say. And as you look round the sixty running feet of wall space
in the provocative little gallery and gaze at geometric diagrams, quite orderly and sometimes
of handsome pattern, you note that these patterns are in part made up of algebraic symbols,
not always equations, but just casual observations, pleasing mathematical musings, such as
“az + b* ij: c3,” which in your schooldays you would have translated as “ a cube, plus b cube,
plus or minus c cube.”

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