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

apply to personal and social purposes. His mysticism did not raise him above
our sociological clamor. Only French Post-cubism aspires to the logical
self-end of art. In it the artist is concerned with only his own-self-realization,
leaving it to the sociologists to turn to popular use the new revelation of
racial humanity. All he asks for is freedom — not even for understanding.
*****
The evolution here surveyed, while showing the vitality of institutional-
ism even in those who combat the old order of things, is, nevertheless only
one phase of those innovators’ lives. Real links between two epochs, they
have mirrored both in their art. Such is genius.
Their very institutionalism they have turned into a pick to uproot the
non-personal life and art.
Romanticism, the social mystic, broke the path. Delacroix came to
nature as her master. Nature, he said, was a mere dictionary whence words
and phrases came for poetry. Literalism is a mere copying out of a dictionary
— words, but not a poem. When later on, Gauguin exclaimed: “No art
without imagination,” he only echoed Delacroix’s thoughts, which, as Baude-
laire realized, have become the new art-principles.
Courbet’s realism was, on its other side, a protest against the then prev-
alent stifling conventionalism; and such was also the whole of Impressionism,
which insisted upon what it deemed natural vision as against theinstitutional eye.
Later on, the opposition to science-intoxicated Impressionism was an
uprising against the tyranny of a theory of optics.
Thus, the free man, step by step, fought for his right. Neither concrete
things nor abstract rules could deter him. “No objects but objectivity’’
demands Cezanne: “not the sun as it is, but recreated” as it feels. Man is
not a copyist of experience, but a creator of it; and so is art, such as he
wills it to be, thought that arch-primitive. What institution could fetter a
spirit like this?
With Cezanne came an elemental demand for truly humanized art. No
more of the undiscriminating immersion of nature in a sun-dust of a Monet,
that turns pebbles into gems, as darkness turns all cats gray. No more of
worship of nature’s holiday attire, but the search for its soul, — became the
watchword of Cezanne’s and Van Gogh’s art. In these two the age of acute
reality-perception is most clearly exemplified. Their aim is modern art’s
soundest formulation: To reveal reality by form; its soul in color; its dynamics
in line; its mystic leitmotiv in tone-relations; — in fine, to synthesize the world
in symbols born of racial experience.
* * * * *
The second postulate of New art is vindicated and typified by Van Gogh’s
vulcanic sociality and Cezanne’s primitive intuitional objectivism.
The Post-cubists have committed the error of naming the latter “abstrac-
tion” and at once proceeded to exploit all of the possibilities of such a
purely analytical process, as that term implies. This has caused them, imper-
ceptibly, to give up their racial universalism for a merely logical one, and objec-
tive conception for the abstract one. Thus their third postulate originated.

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