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

OBSERVATIONS IN BLACK AND WHITE

Sincerity is the supreme commandment in art. Without obeying it no
artist can work out his salvation, no people can have a national art. The
opposite is true of trade as an art of gaining money. An individual, a nation,
may perfectly well achieve both arts, but only so long as the condition peculiar
to the one art is kept out of the other. There is no compromise between the two.
And sincerity, in order that it may be expressed with originality, means spiritual
liberty. I don’t know, if it is harder for most people to gain or to bear that state.
Thus Americans, after having won political freedom and given liberty
to their slaves, pursue happiness of mind and culture by continuously enslaving
themselves.
However, to me, and others, in Berlin, in 1892 it seemed, as if in America
there would exist that all around liberty, that freedom, especially, from
tradition, in short, such conditions, under which a new idea, in architecture, if
not in art, could take form all the better; while the soil of the old world seemed
too hard and sterile from tradition for so tender a plant as a still vague thought
of a new style. Therefore—mistaken though I was in both respects—I set
sail for America, in 1892.
Too late I read Martin Chuzzlewit—the professorial pioneer of Dickens’
imagination. Now, I know, that his satire is only too truthfully based upon
that famous American insincerity: humbug. I know it, because it has been
my lot here, in these twenty years and over, to have a thorough, most varied
and pretty wide experience of life. The price I paid for success as an architect
was a complete disillusionment, or rather, I won this price of being allowed
to look at the skeleton in the American closet, through personal sacrifice called
“success”—as you care to view it.
To make a very long story short, I will here only say that I look back
without regret or blushing to the time, when I carried all my belongings in
an empty vest pocket, my letters of introduction into an ash can, my ideals
to a Hester Street pawnbroker and started at the bottom of the great American
melting pot of men and things, viz.: the struggle for getting up. In no better
way, and, while pushing through the thin and the thick of American life,
the horizontal and vertical of American society, near and far, towards the
so-called top—could I learn to comprehend, that in this land all things espe-
cially artistic ones, pale into utter insignificance before and are viewed prin-
cipally through the great stomach-question, the mark of which is $-.
For, the American contemporary carries his brains beneath his stomach
and his pocket-book, therefore he views all things, and art, from the point of
the practical, the profitable. I could not have said this twenty years ago.
But now, that I do say it, I know it to be so. A lawyer sees men as they are
not, a physician as they would be, a pastor as they should be, but an architect
sees them as they are. And I have seen, like Odysseus, “many men’s places
and learned of their minds” —all over American society.
Especially, too, there where the “artistic” is supposed to be an accom-
plishment or a dressing of silver and gold-plate.
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