Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1916 (Heft 48))

PAINTINGS BY FRANCIS PICABIA
From January twelfth to January twenty-sixth the most recent work,
by Francis Picabia, three oil paintings each about twelve feet square,—and
never before exhibited anywhere,—were shown in the main room of “291”.
This exhibition brought to a close the definite series of experiments begun
at “291” some years ago. And the underlying idea of this series was summed
up in the exhibitions of Negro Art, Picasso-Braque, closing with Picabia.
MARION H. BECKETT AND KATHARINE N. RHOADES
From January twenty-seventh until February twenty-second, both rooms
of “291” were filled with paintings by two young New York women, Marion
H. Beckett, and Katharine N. Rhoades.

Mrs. Eugene Meyer, Jr., handed us the following critique on these
workers:
I should like to compare Katharine Rhoades’ and Marion Beckett’s work not merely be-
cause they happened to show at “291” at the same time but because their method of approach,
their execution and even the problems which each still has to solve all present such a direct
contrast that a comparison of the two points of view is helpful in the understanding of each.
This contrast can best be explained by an analysis of the different mental processes in
back of the work. Miss Beckett’s mind has a photographic quality which makes a direct
translation of the object to the canvas. Her feeling for form is so fine and so exact that her
paintings always have a camera-like fidelity to the subject but so sensitive is she to the value
and final significance of planes and surfaces that her work, especially the portraits, at first seems
based upon the subtlest kind of psychological analysis. It is, however, through her knowledge
of the material that she arrives at the spirit. Just as the character of a person moulds every
line of his physiognomy so Miss Beckett through her instinctive reconstruction of the line
works back to a representation of the character, but life pulsates none the less vigorously in her
paintings, perhaps even more so because it comes not as a thing deliberately sought but as the
spontaneous by-product of a great love for all the forms that life takes in expressing itself.
In other words she has a purely objective and deductive type of mind, one that accepts the
result and works back to the cause, and her method for the sake of summing up can best be
described as that of analysis after the fact.
Miss Rhoades’ method is just the opposite. Her whole impulse to paint seems to spring
from a close communion with and a desire to impart the underlying significance of the world
as she sees it and whether she depicts a human being, a sweep of hills or a group of elms, always
she arrives at the form through her sensing of the soul of things. So strong is this impulse in
her that we are actually conscious at times of an intense struggle to find and depict the outward
form that will adequately express all its inner beauty. For this reason there seems at first to be
a strange and foreign quality in her portraits but a sympathetic study reveals the fact that she
has seen further or at least differently than we and expressed in her depiction of the sitter
qualities we had not known him to possess. Marion Beckett could do an adequate portrait of
a stranger as she needs only her subject as a point of departure but Katharine Rhoades would
do the model justice only after she has had an opportunity to determine upon his quality of
self. Her mind is therefore subjective and wholly inductive and her method one of analysis
before the fact.
This method is necessarily dependent upon a deep sympathy and understanding of the
universe, upon experience and the ability to express that experience. When so young a painter
as Miss Rhoades uses it, her early work will inevitably show a lack of complete domination of
her medium, a struggle with what is commonly called technique that results quite naturally
from the effort to constrain thought in form. But the outer certainty is bound to follow the
inner certainty that development will bring and the compensation for the early struggle lies in
the fact that the possibilities of her art are bounded only by her own. Something like a proof
of this analysis can be found in the fact that Miss Rhoades also writes but as her brush learns to
keep pace with her mind, as her expression in paint becomes more and more facile, I am sure
that the need of a literary outlet will constantly decrease.

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