Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Special number))

why don’t you make it simpler?” they cry. “Because this is the only way
in which I can express what I want to express” is the invariable reply, which
of course is the unanswerable argument of every sincere artist to every critic,
and again and again comes the refrain that is so familiar before the canvases
of Picasso, “but it is so ugly—so brutal!”—But how does one know that it
is ugly after all? How does one know? Each time that beauty has been
reborn in the world it has needed a complete readjustment of sense-percep-
tions, grown all too accustomed to the blurred outlines, faded colors, the
death in life of beauty in decline. Our taste has become jaded from over-
familiarity, from long association and from inertia. If one cares for Rem-
brandt’s paintings today, then how could one have cared for them at the
time when they were painted, when they were glowing with life? If we like
St. Marks in Venice today, then surely it would have offended us a thousand
years ago. Perhaps it is not Rembrandt’s painting that one cares for after
all, but merely for the shell, the ghost, the last pale flicker of the artist’s
intention. Beauty? One thing is certain, that if we must worship beauty
as we have known it, we must consent to worship it as a thing dead. “Un-
grande, belle chose morte.” And ugliness? What is it? Surely only death
is ugly.
In Gertrude Stein’s writing every word lives, and apart from the concept
it is so exquisitely rhythmical and cadenced that when read aloud and received
as pure sound it is like a kind of sensuous music. Just as one may stop,
for once in a way, before a canvas of Picasso’s and, letting one’s reason sleep
for an instant, may exclaim: “It is a fine pattern!”—so listening to Gertrude
Stein’s words and forgetting to try to understand what they mean, one
submits to their gradual charm. Huntley Carter of the “New Age” says
that her use of language has a curious hypnotic effect when read aloud.
In one phase of her writing she made use of repetition and the re-arranging
of certain words over and over, so that they became adjusted into a kind of
incantation, and in listening one feels that from the combination of repeated
sounds varied ever so little, that there emerges gradually a perception of
some meaning quite other than that of the contents of the phrases. Many
people have experienced this magical evocation, but have been unable to
explain in what way it came to pass, but though they did not know what
meaning the words were bearing, nor how they were affected by them, yet
they had begun to know what it all meant, because they were not indifferent.
In a portrait that she has finished recently, she has produced a coherent
totality through a series of impressions, which, when taken sentence by
sentence, strike most people as particularly incoherent. An interesting thing
in connection with this portrait is that a record has been kept of the com-
ments and criticisms upon it, which forms in itself a most accurate description
of the model. Surely portraiture can hardly go further than this! Each
comment upon the portrait was characteristic of the subject and fitted her
perfectly as seen from the angle of the critic. In each of the portraits that

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