Adolph Wolff in the International:
Constantine Brancusi, whose work has been on view at the Photo-Secession rooms, 291
Fifth Avenue, is one of the most interesting figures in the art world of today. The several
pieces on view are not to be forgotten by those who have seen them.
Silence speaks louder than words. Its loudness is not noise but music and thus speaks the
works of Brancusi. He is very new because he is very old. He is very strong because he is
very gentle. He is very complete because he is very fragmentary. He is very pagan because
he is very religious. Yes! Religious. I can see him kneeling in adoration before the holy curve.
To keep inviolate the immaculate purity of the curve he sacrifices the minor parts, obliterating
them completely or reducing them to a minimum of projectivity and converting them into
decorative elements.
Brancusi is a magician who throws nature into a mystical cauldron from which she emerges
purified, sanctified, essentialized. The mystic bird of brass is the most perfect of his attainments
shown at this exhibition. Brancusi is the sculptor of the greater form; the average known
sculptors compared to him are as pigmies compared to giants. Our famous American sculptors
should study and meditate over the work of such masters as Brancusi. They may learn some-
thing; they may learn that they are criminals who have been murdering innocent marble and
deforming defenseless bronze—crimes that are unforgivable because they are unforgetable.

Charles H. Caffin in the New York American:
Paintings and drawings of Frank Burty are being shown at the gallery of the Photo-
Secession, No. 291 Fifth avenue.
It seems that before he studied art in the form of painting, he devoted many years to
music, particularly in the direction of composition. His turning to drawing and painting was
the result of his friendship with Picasso.
As is to be expected of a student of musical composition, he displays a remarkable instinct
for structural form, organic arrangement and rhythmical relations.
Before having time to note individual pictures, I was conscious of the organic orderliness
of the ensemble. Here is a painter who is neither groping nor showing off He has ideas of a
subject, but ponders and digests them before committing them to the canvas or paper, and, when
he reaches this stage, has no notion of displaying a flamboyant technique.
A true artist’s reticence has a peculiar eloquence; it speaks deliberately, with choice
selection, and with a certainty that lasts. This is the kind of reticence that Burty is disciplining
himself to express, and in it he has already acquired a marked proficiency.
The pictures are arranged chronologically, and early in the series come some which show
him to have been experimenting with Picasso’s form of cubism. But it is in no spirit of imita-
tion and evidently in obedience to his own instinct for organic solidity.
One may be convinced of this, since the first example here, “Landscape—Cerdagne,”
reveals the instinct, and its expression becomes increasingly realized in subsequent pictures.
Perhaps it culminates, so far as this show is concerned, in a nude figure of a woman seen against
a red background.
She is not alluring in the ordinary painter way, but if you are alive to the abstract sensa-
tions that the suggestion of actual solid structural form can stimulate, it will not fail to attract
you, as it does me, with a sheer and clean delight.
Again, I am very much attracted by “Woman at a Window,” a long French window,
opening onto an iron balustrade, with foliage beyond. Here again is vigorous stimulation of
the tactile sense, but there is also a remarkable feeling for light. And, having noted this instance,
one finds it repeated in many others.
Now, the feeling for light is an old story, especially with modern painters; and their
increased capacity for rendering it has up till lately been their chief contribution to the art.
But this feeling and its rendering are different from the ordinary; and when you come to study it
you reach the conclusion that the difference consists in this: Whereas, the generality of painters
see the object enveloped in light and render it as if the light were imposed upon it, Burty feels
the light as given forth from the subject.
Thus the light seems actually to emanate from his picture, as it does in one of Rem-
brandt’s. But while the latter used the principle mostly to create an idealization of his subject