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

J. Edgar Chamberlain in the New York Evening Mail:
The paintings and drawings of Frank Burty at the Photo-Secession (the last exhibition
there of the season), are rather a rest from cubism, futurism, post-impressionism and the other
isms. Mr. Burty is an original like the rest, but not in any incomprehensible way. He seems
to be a realist; he paints women, peasants, draped and undraped, with startling fidelity to
rather squalid facts, but there is a kind of sweetness, of imaginative suggestion, about these
homely faces and figures that stirs the fancy of the beholder. His color, and particularly the
flesh, is rich, tender, deep.
His drawings are summary and graphic. He yields to the supposed fascinations of cubisms
only to this extent, that he is willing to take a graven Congo image, a rude piece of negro carving,
and paint it as still life. As the result, we have a “cubist” picture, indeed, but only because
the model was cubist.
Mr. Burty’s drawing is so good, so simple, so full of integrity, that it must do our painters
and students good to look at it.
Rene Guy Du Bois in Arts and Decoration:
Another modern—this time, as Mr. Stieglitz calls him, a youth in art—from the Paris
of the sensationalists has shown his work at the Photo-Secession Gallery. He is Frank Burty.
He began to seek expression in the medium of music. Picasso’s cubism lured him from the
piano to the easel. He began to paint. And perhaps now, unless literature in the form
made so entertaining by Gertrude Stein has substituted the pen for the brush, he continues
to paint. One can never apply positive statements to moderns. They are creatures of tem-
perament and, if a little haphazardly, expressionists. Mr. Burty himself is not a linguist. I
judge this from the language of his painting. That is very limited in scope. It leads him into
very grave errors, into bad sequences and arrangements of forms or of words. He is a true
youth in art. Indeed, he is almost a baby in art. One must search attentively for his mean-
ing and, finding something, weigh it with care and then with eyes shut, thus giving greater
play to imagination, make a guess. Any one guess is doubtless as good as another and cer-
tainly worth any fun that may be derived from it. We have no quarrel with Mr. Burty. Mr.
Stieglitz, who showed his works, is the real offender and we are prejudiced in favor of Mr.
Stieglitz. He has made it his business to give New York art circles a tangible tangle at which
to point derisive fingers and he has succeeded very well. Since we have an I. W. W. in our
streets, it is fine that we have one in our galleries to complete, as this does, almost literally,
the connection of art with life. Furthermore, Mr. Stieglitz’s I. W. W., like the I. W. W. in the
street, is not, in everything but language, entirely at fault. It has bad manners. It waves
its little red flag a little too blatantly. It is over impulsive and over loud. But then in
everything new it is inevitable that we find a certain amount or a great amount of things that
are disagreeable to us, for everything new is, by its very nature, a poke at existing conditions.
And existing conditions must invariably arrive at a time when the poke is necessary to their
life, or to the realization of their existence.
James G. Huneker in Puck:
The Frank Burty paintings and drawings at the Photo-Secession gallery are meritorious,
as being the production of a young man who has held a brush in his hand for only three years.
Formerly a music student—I confess I fail to find the so-called musical harmonics and rhythms
in his work—he took up painting from sheer love. He is a grandson of the once famous
Parisian art writer of the same name. I found evidences of honest straightforward workman-
ship, in company with sane observation. Of course, if you wish to, you can see the visible
world as a cock-eyed symbol, but in the end air and sunshine—or rain and clouds—and the
bravery and bulk of natural forms prevail over the absinthe abstractions of studios and self-
admiring cenacles. I think Mr. Burty will “do things” some day. I found Mr. Alfred Stieg-
litz still the enthusiast and rebel against the provinciality of American ideas in the region of
art. He has fought a good fight, and for the sheer love of art; for the profit of his soul and
not of his pocket. An idealist born, not made.

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