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

seemed to me. In most great cities you could unearth odd little studios
and galleries, as shabby as Two-Nine-One and as gloriously devoid of marble
pillars, where the cranky exhibit their crankiness and the strange and the
novel and the weird and the down-with-the-bourgeois hold their court. But
most of these retreats (though God forbid that we should sneer at them, for
they are often the haunt of true martyrs in the cause) are backwaters aside
from the main current. That what their art has to say attracts no audience
may be a pity; but even were the audience to arrive it would be fed with
but poor, thin food. For the great Purveyor of Ideas is one who not only
lives en rapport with his audience, but actually derives half his force from
them: he takes their life and having transmuted it hands it back to them.
At Two-Nine-One this is seen visibly in action. The idealess enters. Pic-
tures are seen, words exchanged. And behold, the idealess discovers not
that he has been forcibly gagged and stuffed with ideas, but that in absorb-
ing some ideas he has found that he already possessed quite a lot of his own
and is capable of manufacturing more, endlessly. Departing, he leaves
some of them behind. Monsieur the Director has captured them. He
catches and gives a show to passing ideas as he catches and gives a show to
passing pictures. Nothing is entombed at Two-Nine-One; nothing expires
because of a vacuum; nothing is frozen by dignity.
It came to pass that in the office of the staidest of American monthly
magazines the Art Editor, with whom I was wasting an hour in the manner
known, the world over, as a hasty business chat, said to me: “You must go
and see the Photo-Secession Gallery.” It is true that he gave me its address
wrongly, as a result of the vagueness that is apparently a gift without which
no Art Editor can become an Art Editor (and I already knew the right ad-
dress, and had been there, which was more than he had); but what was sig-
nificant in the incident was that in this office they had heard of Two-Nine-One
at all. Two-Nine-One is not, to New York, what any art gallery, grand or
modest, is to London. To say that it is celebrated is insufficient: plenty of
such phenomena are celebrated for their absurdity or their daring alone.
Two-Nine-One can—in some people’s view—manage the absurd and the
daring, but it exists on neither, is known not because it advertises but more
because it refrains from advertising. When I walked in I gained the im-
pression that other people walked in for the same reason that I did, not because
to stay away would be to remain outside the pale of a “movement” (for we
are all cute enough nowadays to keep aloof from “movements”) but because
to stay away would be to miss a treat. That, it would seem, ought to apply
too to going to an intellectual play or reading the latest clever book: to
shirk the theatre or to fail to buy the book is to miss a treat. Well, we don’t
care. It is with a weary sigh of self-indulgence that we miss such treats.
The treat at Two-Nine-One is of another sort which brings me back to
where I started. The reason we don’t read or look at pictures or go to the
theatre is not, at bottom, altogether our fault: it is the fault of the deadness
of most books and most pictures and most plays. Somehow—that’s the
secret!—the things at Two-Nine-One are not dead as the (superficially) simi-

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