Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1914 (Heft 45))

Adolph Wolff in the International:
Come, all ye, whose souls are famished.
A banquet has been prepared for your delectation;
Come, and feast your eyes on these visual ambrosias, and hydromels. Drink ye freely
of these mystic wines, of most ancient vintage; that also ye may rise into the state of grace of
spiritual intoxication. Come and join the exulting choir of pentagrams, triangles, squares,
circles, eight-point stars and the rest of the host of symbols and emblems that, garbed in glowing
raiment for the mystical wedding of the seen, and the unseen, are singing, glory, glory,
GLORY UNTO THE MOST HIGH JOY OF THE SPIRIT THROUGH THE SENSES!
Marsden Hartley, this necromancer of paint and brush, is a man of today, who, with the
raw material of yesterday creates an art of tomorrow. He plunges his master-hand into the
rubbish pit of the past, to dazzle us with a shower of stars.
In an age of almost exact science, and materialistic preoccupations, this man leaves the
world of beings and of things to penetrate the well-nigh forgotten cemetery of long-discarded
and much distained emblems and symbols and, like unto the angel of the Apocalypse, blasting
the trumpet of genius, brings the dead to life. Marsden Hartley truly brings the dead to life
and bringing the dead to life, that is art!
If you are alive, whoever you be, go to the great little Photo-Secession Gallery at 291 Fifth
Avenue, where the Marsden Hartley masterpieces will be on view until about the 5th of February.

Charles H. Caffin in the New York American:
A remarkable exhibition of children’s work in colored chalks and water-color is being
shown at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, No. 291 Fifth Avenue.
It may seem incongruous to apply the word “artist” to children of this age, especially
as I myself reserve the qualification, as far as possible, for those in whom I can discover some-
thing of a creative vision and a feeling for aesthetic expression. But it is the wonderful revela-
tion of such qualities in some of these children that makes the exhibition not only artistically
appealing, but a thing to be studied by every one who is engaged in psychological and educa-
tional problems.
For here we are assured—and may as well accept it as true—that there has been no foster-
ing of these children’s talents or supervision of their work. The exhibition reveals something
of the processes of the child mind not only in its observation of facts, but also in the workings
of its imagination.
Here, for example, is a panoramic landscape or map—for it is much of both—done by a
boy of ten, the inmate of an orphan asylum. He has spread out upon a sheet of paper, some
eighteen inches by ten, what may be a square mile, more or less, of his familiar surroundings.
Houses in detail, streets, a river and its affluents, the railroad, station, hills, trees, fields with
goats feeding, and so on—everything recorded with exact precision and apparently in correct
relations.
It is really a marvel of observation and execution, but the wonder grows as one notes that
in his use of color this boy of ten has shown a remarkable aesthetic feeling for harmony of tones.
Psychologists tell us that in the matter of drawing the child begins with observation
and a desire to record the facts it has noted; then, from about ten years old, especially in the
case of boys, develops an interest in the technical manner of rendering; but that the third stage
of aesthetic appreciation of beauty usually comes with the approach of adolescence, and is more
noticeable in the case of girls.
Therefore either this boy must be regarded as quite exceptional or else a revision of this
theory of evolution in relation to age and sex seems necessary. For the theory is rendered
questionable not only by the case of this boy of ten, but also by that of a little girl somewhat
younger.
With her it is imagination rather than observation that provides the impulse. Her draw-
ings have not the technical precision of the boy’s; but her feeling for color is at once more

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