Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1914 (Heft 47))

And now we return to Two-Nine-One. Thither I repaired in due course.
I had not crossed the threshold of a picture gallery for months, except to
examine exhibitions of photographs, with which I happen to have a special
concern. (Photographers, moreover, have not had time to grow tired of
photography. At least, not very.) The last time I had visited a collection
of paintings I had found them housed in an edifice whose pillars were of
marble and whose atrium was ornamented with a fountain which made me
think of harems and expensive restaurants. Vistas of costly canvases
stretched as far as eye could reach in every direction, and the only objects in
sight which looked as though they would not provoke a headache were the
occasional art-students, happy—and often flirting—behind the easels on
which stood their endeavours to be unoriginal (or, more praiseworthily, to
make money). So I envisaged picture galleries as domains of a dreadful
dignity, terrible as tombs, a godsend only to their architects, to building-con-
tractors, and to the vendors (whoever they may be) of the material from
which marble pillars are manufactured.
Dignified—that is what most galleries are. Lo, Two-Nine-One wasn’t an
atom dignified. Item the first: not only was Two-Nine-One non-dignified,
but its atmosphere did not demand that its visitor should be dignified either.
Thus, instead of having to think about himself and his own demeanour (which
is the curse of dignity) he was freed to think about other things.
How to make him think? That, of course, is the secret of Two-Nine-
One’s creator. It is contrived somehow: this is all we are aware of. We
go into Two-Nine-One, and incidentally enjoy (or hate) the pictures; but
the real benefit is not so much in the enjoyment or hatred—good though this
may be for the soul—as in the circumstance that, emerging, we find ourselves
a-simmer with ideas. And not a marble pillar was required for the cure!
No vistas, here, of headaches; no soothing splash of fountains; just a small
room, a trifle shabby, with some pictures—queer, wrong-headed, wonderful,
devastatingly new, disconcertingly old, exasperating, adorable, simple, com-
plex, obvious, incomprehensible or what not. And Monsieur the Director,
who possibly retains and suffers the headaches which everybody else ought
to go away with but doesn’t.
What does it all amount to? To answer that would be like defining
what Two-Nine-One “stands for” or “means”: those maddeningly woolly
verbs which journalists (as I know, for I am one) have coined to escape
exactitude. As well reply to the eager inquirer who would fain be told
whether Two-Nine-One is “making good”! Two-Nine-One is like one of
those minute specks which a scientist shows you, protoplasm or cell or seed
or whatever it is, which guard the something in them, life, by virtue whereof
they grow or subdivide and increase and multiply—or sprout into a plant
with frail swaying blossoms of beauty but a sturdy stem. It is all very
miraculous, but it cannot occur in a vacuum. The plant draws its suste-
nance from outside: only from inside comes the power of its chemistry to
transform that sustenance into the flowers or fruit. Now it is the same with
Two-Nine-One. It is immensely in touch with the world—at least, so it

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