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

Pliny deplored the decadence of painting at his time and ascribed it to
similar causes. We find that Matisse and many others, as Zac, Sousa Cardozo,
Henri Rousseau, Toorop, revert also to the ornamental of symbolic expression
of things, by which means also the Primitives, likewise the Persians, Egyptians,
and archaic peoples attained beauty. Experimenters of this kind are mis-
named “Mystics,” “Symbolists,” for want of comprehending the artist’s
simple business of creating beauty and expressing himself, and not of manu-
facturing brainlessly illusions of the actual. Cezanne in his pastoral motives
combines the human figures and landscape into a oneness of form and line.
In this method of composition he followed El Greco and thereby takes up
once more the true way of art, that of rearranging the component parts of
nature as pictorial units according to the idea of a picture which in itself is a
new reality and not an imitation. Thus the thread runs straight back through
the periods of classical painting of the sixteenth, fifteenth, and fourteenth
centuries; and Giotto and Fiesole are on a straight line that leads back to
Persia, India, and China. They clearly appear connected; they are possibly
so in a historical way.
The trend of all this is to free and widen the power of art by abstracting
—more or less, as the artist chooses—pure artistic expression from concrete
imitation. The world is tired of seeing nothing but imitation of reality.
Painters rush from the Poles to the Equator, from Polynesia to Siberia, to
compete with the photographers and the illustrated weeklies. They satisfy,
at best, the empty curiosities of a philistine public that has no use for or
appreciation of real art. Nor ever will have so long as it forgets that beauty
commences in the simple technical performances—as in ornament, for exam-
ple, and decoration—and that the higher emotional pleasures of beauty,—
harmony between expression and idea—cannot be experienced without a
certain effort and collaboration with the artist on the part of the spectator.
When the public will take that attitude toward art and its new movements,
it will appreciate the many new and varied harmonies the International
Exhibition showed and that future ones will show. It will learn that the
new vision of nature and the new synthesis of the pictorial elements are
not a capricious, but a conscious movement for perfect freedom of artistic
individuality and for expression of modern culture.
The possibility of abstract painting is recognized by critics and painters
who think, but do not belong to the new movement. For instance, Birge
Harrison wrote that future painting may discard all realistic symbols (imita-
tion) for pure color-harmony. Great colorists, however, like great composers,
are very rare. Artists are, so far, more concerned in realizing a new pictorial
precision of form (Cubists) or a new arrangement of the imitative elements
(Futurists). In this, however crude or strange their work may appear at first
sight, they exert imagination and move forward within the lines of pure art,
as opposed to its merchantable adulteration by sleek and dexterous technicians
who pamper a vain and sentimental bourgeoisie with superficial conven-

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