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

IMPRESSIONS OF 291

The gray walls of the little gallery are always pregnant.
A new development greets me at each visit, I am never disappointed.
Sometimes I am pleased, sometimes surprised, sometimes hurt. But I always
possess the situation. A personality lives through it all. Each time a dif-
ferent element of it expressed by the same means appears. There is a unity
in these succeeding and recurring elements.
Cezanne the naturalist; Picasso the mystic realist; Matisse of large
charms and Chinese refinement; Brancusi the divine machinist; Rodin the
illusionist—Picabia surveyor of emotions—Hartley the revolutionist—Walk-
owitz the multiplier; Marin the lyrist; De Zayas insinuating; Burty the
intimate; the children, elemental.
A Man, the lover of all through himself stands in his little gray room.
His eyes have no sparks—they burn within. The words he utters come from
everywhere and their meaning lies in the future. The Man is inevitable.
Everyone moves him and no one moves him. The Man through all expresses
himself.
Man Ray

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It seems like an impossibility to write on “291.” It is an impossibility.
For how can mere words impart to another its real spirit? It is so big, so
pure, so living, that the more one says, the more apt one is to take away
from its bigness. And to give another even a faint idea of the universal
influence of “291” would fill books—and when the books were filled, what
would they mean? for “291” is too living to be confined to words.
For me it has been a sublime school. It permits you to grow naturally,
never fixing laws, but helping you to see clearly and choose for yourself.
It fosters everything that is beautiful, and destroys all that is ugly.
All who enter into its little abode are sure to feel the great force that is
living and growing there.
Marie J. Rapp

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