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

and which has been successively, according to the development and the new
needs of each epoch, the symbolism of Gothic art, the cleverness and the
individualism of the Renaissance, the realism of the Impressionists, and which
is the Intellectualism and the spirit of analysis of our time. But in spite of
all its different forms of materialization the real “raison d’etre artistique”
remains the same, as mysterious and incapable of analysis in the art of
antiquity as it is in the art of today. In the presence of a work of art of any
time we can only define and analyze its mode of materializing; but what it
is that makes it “beautiful” (to use a very indefinite word, but the only one
which is given us by our vocabulary) will always escape all analysis; and we
can only rest content to feel the special pleasure that we do, in the artist’s
expression, without seeking to or knowing how to explain it.
It does seem evident that instead of belittling itself in suppressing all
mechanical reproduction modern painting has enlarged and added to its
resources. It has freed from all shackles the imagination of the artist and
has found the formula for expressing itself that is the most adequate for the
development towards the abstract which is the tendency of our modern
thought. Gabriele Buffet.

THE LATEST EVOLUTION IN ART AND PICABIA
THE majority, the great majority of the lovers of art, are puzzled
before the last work of Picabia. Their first impression is one of amuse-
ment, but, by the awakening of the “Consciousness” of their own
artistic “cliche” of what art means to them through the accumulated im-
pressions of the past, there arises in them a sense of intense revolt. This
revolt is due to the fact that they are now being robbed of that art which
gave them merely pleasure. This great majority of art lovers does not possess
the faculty of having mental struggles with other of their spiritual interests.
Their emotions are unrelated to each other, unilateral and local. Suppose,
for example, in one part of the nature of a man lies his capacity for artistic
emotion. In another part, the accumulation of his conceptions of truth.
Still another part represents his moral or ethical character which has de-
veloped by his experience, etc. Now, when the average man is confronted
with a work of art, instead of its reacting upon all these together which would
focus in a unified and complex emotion drawn from all sides of his nature,
his habit is usually to bring merely his aesthetic judgment to bear upon it.
Lacking support of his other functions, this artistic emotion is a temporary
stimulant only. It lives for a moment and dies again in the next moment for
want of the other life-giving elements, which all together constitute the
cosmic or universal intelligence in man.
A small minority of people of course do experience this wholeness of
judgment and they also feel usually a revolt at the struggle that takes place
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