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

Burty. The high heels of the homely young lady might have been done by Toulouse-Lautrec,
but you see at least we noticed them. Not even Sargent can interest us in high heels any more.
He has done them so often he probably has lost interest in them himself. That Mr. Burty
can compel us to examine carefully a still life of a lamp upon the wall, several plain kitchen
tables and various arrangements in which lemons have been placed at unexpected parts of the
picture leads us to the belief that he is a real artist. In spite of all the Academy may say, it is
easier for some people to be artists than it is for others. The interesting ones interest because
they themselves are interested. The popular word for it is magnetism.
W. B. McCormick in the New York Press:
In Bardeen’s “System of Rhetoric” there is a story of a man who went through Harvard
and after he was graduated opened a fish market in Cambridge. The then president of Harvard
University on hearing of this declared that the incident showed the value of a college educa-
tion, since the Harvard alumnus knew just what he was suited for when he left college.
The ancient story—it dates from before the days of Eliot—is revived here since it applies
to another Harvard graduate, who has settled down on a little farm in the south of France to
paint pictures, which shows that he, too, knows what he wants to do. The man is Frank Burty
Haviland, a brother of Paul Haviland of New York, who desires to appear before the world
as simply Frank Burty. His pictures may be seen in the Photo-Secession Gallery, where Mr.
Stieglitz is showing them partly because he believes Burty to be a “living force in art” and an
“original worker” (which usually connotes something queer in the Stieglitz shop) and because
he needs artists like Burty to help him in his avocation of studying men and women in his
“laboratory.” Possibly you don’t know it, but whenever you go into the Photo-Secession
you are simply another “case” for the amiable and persistent Stieglitz to try his experiments on.
Burty’s art is not so striking as some we have seen in the Photo-Secession. It includes a
few academic pictures that it is nonsense to see anything in except the most commonplace vision,
color and composition. Influenced by Picasso, as he has been, one sees reflection of this “Wild
Beast” here and there in some crude still life pictures, a view of some housetops and another
of the fortifications that ring Paris round, and a representation of a Venetian blind falling down
stairs that is really a Chinese toy and some blocks piled on top of a table, I was told. If there
is any “living force” in the “Woman at Window,” the “Nude Combing Hair” and the “Still
Life-Lamp,” that one cannot see in any work shown by any student in the average art school,
it will take a brighter lamp than Mr. Burty presents here to show that “living force” to me.
They may be seen until April 25.
Elizabeth Luther Carey in the New York Times:
Frank Burty paints with his own color. One may class him with the Post-Impressionists
or with the Cubists according to the particular canvas under observation, or one may wisely
refrain from classing him; but the admission must be made that color so sensitive and so personal
is not the product of recipe or theory alone, but derives from a subtle and fine appreciation of
color relations not to be taught or learned. He is at his best in his gray pictures. The lamp
with the queer rococo reflector, an affair of zinc or tin or pewter, becomes a shimmering splendor
in his hands, and there is nothing mendacious about the splendor—anyone could see it thus,
but an extraordinary tact in the management of pigment was required to get it into terms of
paint. Then the little arrangement of glassware, it would be difficult indeed to do better than
these fresh tranquil tones. Not merely the colors involved, but their degree of intensity and their
tone-value have occupied his attention, and he succeeds in one thing that perhaps we owe
to the cubists, in associating, that is, extremely subtle color with a strong impression of the
third dimension. In most of his work there is no apparent effort to dodge representation.
He uses the old symbols for features and qualities, but he uses them with freshness and true
naivete. He shows in one picture a brave skyline with an arrangement of roofs admirably
organized. And he has a rather commonplace version of a woman sewing by an open window
or door. The greenery outside and the sense of inrushing air and sweet clean sunlight is refresh-
ing. Mr. Burty is a modernist who has escaped the cruel net of formula to the extent of knowing
what he likes and making his public also know and like it. His work is at the Photo-Secession
Galleries.

42