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

with the increased wonder of being. This is the eye with which a Van Gogh
beholds nature. It is the basis of plastic pantheism in modern art.
Of course, such an infinity and eternity palpitating in an artist’s glimpse
cannot but create the demand for a new cerebration, a new mental instrument,
a new agent of cognition; in short, a new man. Such is the New artist. His
psychology is the key to all of the recent art situation. Post-cubist literature
contains many references to the “special consciousness” evolved in modern
times, that knows, in the words of Gabriele Buffet,* “all that exists above and
beyond it,” and “the new state of mind to which the external world appears
more clearly in the abstract.” Neither was the onerous “sixth sense”*
omitted in this connection by another commentator. With the newly ac-
quired mind the New artist claims to be able to “ pierce below the surface or
grasp the essence of things, and in so doing an infinite form is opened up”;
“the mysterious source of nature is reached.”
The evolution of the latest type of super-social consciousness is the socio-
logical process from which the New artist’s mind can be readily traced. The
new social order has fostered the growth of a soul that renounces its allegiance
to the man-made social forms. These have been demasked and shown up
as mere whirl-pools, or eddies, or bays of a mighty stream, which is the eternal
soul-life. The racial impetus is the moving force of it; the social forms have
failed to stay it. Sociology is fully aware of the newly revealed truth, and
therefore seeks to mine the social clay from the profoundest depths of man’s
soul-life. It looks to raciality as the new social bond; hence it revives the
ancestral forces in man to better serve new-human ends. All this has been
lived through by philosophers, poets, and painters. As a sociological basis
of New art it accounts for its establishment of racial norms in plastic expression,
in place of the conventional ones.
When the church-man, tribe-man, and state-creature are no more typical
embodiments of social life; when the blood of a Giordano Bruno, a Rousseau,
a Stirner, and Nietzsche has risen to a young artist’s head, then the New
Prometheus is born in him. Thence came his disdain of the merely mun-
dane, external, temporal. Hence he felt in institutionalism the chain holding
him to the rock; and in its defenders — the preying vultures. This explains
the New artist’s aggressive attitude towards Old art. Coming from Olympian
heights to give life to men, he could not help combating those who unmanned
mankind; those to whom Hugo von Hoffmannsthal’s words apply.
“Ich habe mich so an Klinstliches verloren
Das ich die Sonne sah aus toten Augen
Und nicht mehr horte, als durch tote Ohren. . . .”
His was the superman revealed in art. In philosophy—for the merely logical
superman such as the mystic was—purely abstract spheres will suffice. In art,
which is, as Kandinsky terms it, “das ewig Objective,” racial objectivity was
the only legitimate sphere for supermanhood. Only the infinity of evolutional
experience, crystallized in our racial characteristics, could contain the Olympian
aspect of reality. Universality and individuality were thus made categories

♦See Camera Work, Special Number, June, 1913.
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