DOI article:
Anne Brigman, What 291 Means to Me
DOI Page / Citation link:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.31336#0023
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This same friend of the Man, did lovely gum-platinum prints, and yet
the Man said, when I asked questions:
“When he does something worth while, something that is an expression
of himself—no one else—it will be time for them in Camera Work.”
Another time, after going over many folios of photographs, my own
among them, I said, “I hoped when I first came, that you would show some
of my things. Now I’m deadly afraid you will.”
“Why?” asked the Man.
“Because,” I answered, “the longer I look at the intelligent beauty of
the work in these folios, the muddier and hotter looking my sepia bromides
grow. How did you ever care to show them?”
The Man’s short gray moustache twitched. He shuffled reams of papers,
magazines, and envelopes.
I had begun to think he hadn’t heard the question, or perhaps forgotten.
Then he adjusted for the hundredth time, with thumb and finger his
pince-nez glasses and glancing over the edges of them said, staccato—
“The way you did them was rotten, but they were a new note—they were
worth while.”
Then he walked out of the liliputian room, and I sat humped up on the
arm of the big chair and stared down Fifth Avenue, trying to focus the un-
arrested lens of my thoughts.
“Rotten—but worth while.”
I was beginning to understand!
Nothing in this place was final (nothing ever is) but things that stayed
for a time were worth while.
Even the parting of the ways of the Secession as a body had begun.
It was one of my gifts of the gods, that I met in those little rooms with
their sunny gloom, nearly all of the Fellows.
As the color fragments in a kaleidoscope keep to a pattern with small
changes for a time, so these Fellows shaped and clustered around the Man
and the Little Gallery.
Then as in the kaleidoscope, full gravity has played its part, and the
colors have been thrown into new forms—more beautiful perhaps than the
old pattern, but all within the same cycle—some colors closer, some further
away.
This little place, the Man in back of It, the Fellows in back of him and
yet shoulder to shoulder, stand for one of the great storm centres of my life.
This was four years ago.
Maybe some who read this, and who have been in the Little Galleries
will wonder where all the “amber-gloom” is.
Perhaps, after all, there was only one pane of dusty yellow glass over-
head in one of the rooms; but you remember how Hans Christian Andersen,
in his boyhood, used to put his mother’s blue kitchen apron over a goose-
berry bush, and then sit under it and dream through the color? That color
glows all through his fairy tales.
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19
the Man said, when I asked questions:
“When he does something worth while, something that is an expression
of himself—no one else—it will be time for them in Camera Work.”
Another time, after going over many folios of photographs, my own
among them, I said, “I hoped when I first came, that you would show some
of my things. Now I’m deadly afraid you will.”
“Why?” asked the Man.
“Because,” I answered, “the longer I look at the intelligent beauty of
the work in these folios, the muddier and hotter looking my sepia bromides
grow. How did you ever care to show them?”
The Man’s short gray moustache twitched. He shuffled reams of papers,
magazines, and envelopes.
I had begun to think he hadn’t heard the question, or perhaps forgotten.
Then he adjusted for the hundredth time, with thumb and finger his
pince-nez glasses and glancing over the edges of them said, staccato—
“The way you did them was rotten, but they were a new note—they were
worth while.”
Then he walked out of the liliputian room, and I sat humped up on the
arm of the big chair and stared down Fifth Avenue, trying to focus the un-
arrested lens of my thoughts.
“Rotten—but worth while.”
I was beginning to understand!
Nothing in this place was final (nothing ever is) but things that stayed
for a time were worth while.
Even the parting of the ways of the Secession as a body had begun.
It was one of my gifts of the gods, that I met in those little rooms with
their sunny gloom, nearly all of the Fellows.
As the color fragments in a kaleidoscope keep to a pattern with small
changes for a time, so these Fellows shaped and clustered around the Man
and the Little Gallery.
Then as in the kaleidoscope, full gravity has played its part, and the
colors have been thrown into new forms—more beautiful perhaps than the
old pattern, but all within the same cycle—some colors closer, some further
away.
This little place, the Man in back of It, the Fellows in back of him and
yet shoulder to shoulder, stand for one of the great storm centres of my life.
This was four years ago.
Maybe some who read this, and who have been in the Little Galleries
will wonder where all the “amber-gloom” is.
Perhaps, after all, there was only one pane of dusty yellow glass over-
head in one of the rooms; but you remember how Hans Christian Andersen,
in his boyhood, used to put his mother’s blue kitchen apron over a goose-
berry bush, and then sit under it and dream through the color? That color
glows all through his fairy tales.
% -jf * * *
19
