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

COSMISM OR AMORPHISM?

THE new Movement in art confirms the Hegelian rule that theory follows
practice. It has now reached a stage when it becomes conscious of
its ways and aims. Growing out of a purely practical life-urge it felt
its way by desultory effort and sporadic attempt, unorganized, questioning
and doubting. Its now evolving philosophy, at last, makes it tangible and
accessible to a determination of its latent vitality, of its potential way and
limit.
Whatever the assertions of its detractors, the New Art expresses a sincere
endeavor to live up to the artist’s racial mission, which consists in summing
up, by self-revelation, the life of mankind. Whatever his plastic conquest,
he has dared to defy the powers of retrogression and has established a standard
for an artist’s free manifestation. He has consciously labored to create a soil
favorable for the growth of true art.
At no time in history was the artist more fully aware of art’s universality
than he is today. Rejecting Zola’s idea of art as a “corner of nature reflected
in one’s intellect,” the New artist declares his more comprehensive point
of view: all cosmos must be distilled in the eternal soul-depths of a full man.
Only the mediaeval mystics, those apostles of fearless thought who sought
to reach the very seat of the Almighty by an act of supreme voluntarism,
only those protesters of individualism dared to aspire as freely, as infinitely,
as does the New artist in his conscious universality. Unintelligible, non-
concrete, as the content of his art appears to the uninitiated observer, it
aims at portrayal, in terms highly individual, of our own environment, in the
broadest sense of the word. A bird’s-eye view proving inadequate, he chooses
a more remote point of view. Paradoxical as it may seem, it nevertheless is
a fact, that the sky-perch of most dreamers is not an act of mundane negation,
but one of superior affirmation; it is solely a desire to better behold one’s
whole reality, an insistence upon contact with a more than finite extent, a de-
termination to possess all in the confines of one soul. Thus, post-cubism,
in spite of its divested corporeality, is not intended as a denial of matter, of
movement, of life, but—just the contrary of nihilism—as a positive attempt to
embody in a plastic master-work the complete immanence, in man’s per-
ception, of all materiality and reality of the universe.
Philosophically the New artist is an outspoken dualist; very much of the
Platonic kind. Monism is still impossible in his mind, which is too resentful
of the 19th century’s materialism to be able to suppress an emphatic idealistic
counterdemonstration. Hence the world’s oneness which our age has come
to feel by way of science as well as by intuition, philosophical and poetical,
appears to the New artist with a preponderance of spirit, and a corresponding
plastic asceticism. The unavoidable imperative of concreteness, forced upon
the artist by the racial nature of his calling—and “racial” cannot be shorn of
its eternally material origins and spheres—is constantly present in this spiritual
system. But, while uneradicable, it must submit to an “Entmaterialisierung”
for its better fitness to the doctrine. The universal oneness must be apparent
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