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

Of course, I myself succeeded from a free man whose time is worth
nothing to where I could name to the millionaire my own price of my time and
work—and thus I became my own slave-seller. Who in dollarland is more
than a free slave and who can be less?
Success! There is our mistaken estimate of men, of art. It cannot
be otherwise, being the answer to the stomach-question, and with the dollar
mark. Americans adore that golden calf—success—and as a dog has fleas
that animal’s is pulex Americana, vulgo Humbug. This national bug hums
in our ears eternally and deafens them against truth which clamors to be
admitted in art. Humbug, the clown of our King Dollar, cousin to Hypocrisy.
Everybody, in order to succeed, first humbugs himself into a suitable
and profitable state of insincerity, then, as he succeeds, he humbugs his
neighbor. Escape? Protest? “What’s the use,” everybody replies, “to
fight against the insincere side of our social and spiritual life, with its indiffer-
ence, trifling superficialness, cowardly safe-and-saneness, dull unimaginative-
ness—social qualifications that smile upon anything but personality. That
which gives life to our trade, is death to our art: the principles of business
enterprise.” Our virtues there are our faults here. In art we know not yet
sincerity, and sacrifice, we have no common ideals, nor the will to suppress
vanity and privilege. Our millionaire expects that his portrait painter does
as well as his bootblack or barber.
So, by 1908, “success” commenced to lose its charms for me, its routine
disgusted me. I found time to peruse all news and other information that
came of the new and young art from Paris, of the astonishing architectural
progress from Germany. Instead of continuing to waste time on our market-
able art insipidities, I dusted off the ideals I once, many years ago, had left
in the care of that Hester Street pawnbroker, where they lay—the stalest
goods on his hands.
So it happened, while I used to mingle with the successful on Fifth
Avenue, that a modest sign arrested my eye: “Photo-Secession.” I paid
no further attention. Once more, and again. It vexed me. It stirred old
reminiscences and fight in me. I was then preparing my speeches for the
1908 political campaign. The foreign name made me consider: “We export
salvation and whisky to the heathens, but we restrict the immigration of
new art, we quarantine a free thought as soon as we fear it might give us the
creeps.” “Photo-Secession,” “Secession?” I said to myself, “it sounds
familiar, as if from Vienna, Paris or Berlin; who in hell can it be! Probably
some fool that does not yet know America. Well, I will out of curiosity, look
him over, and maybe, I can take that useless conceit out of him.” With that
idea I went up.
Before I had quite adjusted my mental antennae and feelers to the
uncommercial humbleness of the place and to the enigmatic note of unpre-
tentious but serious and novel works there living for themselves — I found
myself in the midst of searching argument with some stranger, then with

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