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

quited in silent space this vision is exclusive to a simple reality. Once a thin scarecrow is,
humorously, victim for the elements. With one exception these drawings are given passive
and tumultuous upon the air.
The rear room contained drawings and paintings by C. Duncan and Rene Lafferty. Like
Miss O’Keeffe, Duncan uses the method of picturing non-visual experience while Lafferty has
interpreted the significance to himself of a comet, a dragonfly, and a fountain.
C. Duncan.
My Dear Mr. Stieglitz: I feel very hesitant about trying to write an appreciation of the
woman pictures.
I was startled at their frankness; startled into admiration of the self-knowledge in them.
How new a field of expression such sex consciousness will open.
I felt carried on a wave which took me very near to understanding how to free and so
create forces—it has receded now and leaves me without the words.
I shall never forget the moment of freedom I felt—or the inspiration of how to use it.
May I leave it this way — if it comes to me before your next issue of Camera Work,
I will try to write it, if not, please know I should have liked to.
Self-expression is the first and last difficulty of my living.
Very sincerely,
Killiam’s Point Evelyn Sayer.
Branford, Ct.

As has been our custom, for the sake of record, we reprint some of the
criticisms published in the press on the above exhibitions:
Charles H. Caffin in the “N. Y. American”:
The tenth season at the Little Gallery of “291” Fifth Avenue opens with an exhibition of
statuary in wood by African savages. Hitherto objects corresponding to such as are shown here
have been mostly housed in natural history museums and studied for their ethnological interest.
In the Paris Trocadero, however, their artistic significance has been recognized, as it also has
been by certain French art collectors and by some of the “modernists” among artists—notably
Matisse, Picasso and Brancusi.
It is as the primitive expression of the art instinct, and particularly in relation to modern-
ism in art, that the present exhibition is being held, and it is said that “this is the first time in
the history of exhibitions that negro statuary has been shown from the point of view of art.”
These objects have been obtained from the middle-west coast countries of Africa—Guinea,
the Ivory Coast, Nigeria and the Congo. Nothing is known of their date or of the races who
produced them, the natives in whose possession they were found having come into some sort
of contact with white civilization and lost the traditions of the art.
I have talked with Marius de Zayas, the well-known caricaturist, who for many years has
been studying ethnology in relation to art with the view of discovering the latter’s root idea,
and who accumulated these eighteen examples during his recent visit to Paris. He begins by
reminding one of the accepted premise in the study of the evolution of civilization, namely, that
every stage in the progress of mankind, wherever it may have occurred, has been characterized
by a corresponding attitude toward life and a corresponding expression of it in the handiworks.
While hitherto historians of art have looked for its roots in such directions as the lake
dwellers and the caves of Dordogne, they have overlooked the fact that the white race in itself
represented an evolution in advance of the black. Consequently, to get at the root of art one
must dig deeper than the white primordial and look for it in the black.
The objects, however, which are here shown do not go down to the deepest elemental
expression of the savage. They represent him at a comparatively advanced stage, by which
time he had evolved a very marked feeling for beauty.
These specimens, when once you have got over the first impression of grotesqueness, are
easily found to be distinguished by qualities of form, including the distribution of planes, texture
and skilful craftsmanship that are pregnant with suggestion to one’s aesthetic sense.
With what motive and under what kind of inspiration did the primitive artist carve these
works? Mr. de Zayas explains that the savage looked out upon a world that seemed full of
threats; that his imagination involved no idea of good, but only one of fear of mysterious
agencies whose evil purposes he must avert.

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