Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Heft 44))

tation has entered into a similar period, for it tries with its theories to under-
stand and acquire the laws that govern plastic phenomena, and with its
representations tries to express that phenomena.
Art, before the modern movement, was always synthetic; was always
the final conclusion of a belief; it had no theories but doctrines. Modern
art is analytical; and for this reason it divides and subdivides itself into many
different branches, all of which aim to discover the primary cause of the
plastic significance of the physical world, the concrete. Formerly art was the
expression of a collective or individual belief; now its principal motive is
investigations. It proceeds toward the unknown, and that unknown is
objectivity. It wants to know the essence of things; and it analyses them in
their phenomena of form, following the method of experimentalism set by
science, which consists in the determination of the material conditions in
which a phenomenon appears. It wants to know that significance of plastic
phenomena, and accordingly, it has had to enter into the investigation of the
morphological organism of things. “Man does not limit himself to see; he
thinks and wants to know the significance of the phenomena whose existence
has been revealed to him by observation. Therefore, he reasons; compares
the facts; questions them; and, by the answers he draws, he controls the one
by the other. It is this kind of control, by means of reasonings and facts,
that constitutes, properly speaking, the experience. It is the only procedure
by which we can instruct ourselves in the nature of the things that are out-
side of ourselves.” So says Claude Bernard in his studies on experimentalism.
But while science in its experimentalism deals directly with matter operating
on matter, art to penetrate into the organism of the plastic phenomena of
matter deals only with the sense of sight.
This method, introduced in art, manifests the intellectual attitude of
man toward Nature rather than expresses his beliefs. But, while the “old”
art was the expression of the conception of an idea, or in other terms, ex-
pressed the idea by the conception of its constitutive elements, the “new”
art is not the expression of its theories. It follows, at the same time, two
criterions: one inner, conscious, subjective and absolute; and the other, outer,
experimental and relative. We could say that one is a “mental” analysis
while the other is a “plastic” analysis. With its theories it wants to get at
the subjective truth; and with its practice at the objective truth. It wants
to get at the synthesis of all thought and at the essence of all facts. It follows
science in its method, but not in its spirit.
Some one said, writing about a popular artist, that: “when all sides of
the question have been weighed, it must remain the deeper faith, the greater
glory, to take the world as it is and find the eternal in it, than to seek for our
realities in some fictitious atmosphere born of the imagination.” This phrase
clearly defines the attitude of the modern artist and his utopian aim to find
the eternal subjective and represent it by the eternal objective, when neither
of them is or can be eternal.