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

It spoils our big scene completely. It’s no fun having art shows unless we may wake
somebody up with ’em. Who can we wake up with these carvings? No one. They are
several hundred years old and, therefore, hors concours. Everybody will love them. It would
have been awfully wicked, perhaps, but in the interest of art, justifiable, to have dissembled a
bit with this show. Suppose Mr. Stieglitz had assumed a timid air which he can do very well
and had announced that he wasn’t at all sure that there was merit in these productions, the
work of a little colored boy named Rastus Johnson, who lived at 137th street and Lenox Avenue,
but he was determined to give them a trial; what a fuss there would have been!
Then when Mr. K-ny-on C-x had had his fit, and all of us critics had tied ourselves up
into irretrievable conclusions, we ourselves probably holding Rastus to be an impudent little
upstart totally lacking in sense of decorum and religious instinct, then, we say, Mr. Stieglitz
could have come forward with the truth about these carvings, and he would have had us.
He would have had me, at any rate. For these African antiques are deeply religious.
Mr. Stieglitz claims that all of the pieces in the exhibition are examples of fetich art. “They
didn’t know ‘good,’ these Africans, as we know it. These figures were supposed to ward off
evil.” I have read somewhere that the root of all religions lies in the great Mystery. It began
with the first confrontation with Death. Art that begins so nearly in the same place may well
be serious and may without much fear be accepted as religious. Tolstoy arrived at the idea
that the basic principle in all the great religions was the same. In that case we must ask Mr.
Stieglitz to believe that these long dead Africans, since they did mean passionately what they
carved into his show, knew “good” even as we know it.
The most ancient of these carven masks are the most dynamic. The eyes, lips, nostrils,
project from concave surfaces in these heads as surfaces are projected in modern cubistic art.
The parallel was not long in being remarked; but just who among the cubists was the first to
adopt the cult for it is not known. Matisse has some interesting pieces in his drawing room.
Early in the game they were shown in connection with “cube art.” Last spring the little
gallery started by Mr. Brenner in Washington Square held a few pieces, but this at the Photo-
Secession is the first exhibition of ancient African wood carving, as such. This collection is
owned privately in Paris. The museum at St. Petersburg was desirous of borrowing it for a
show, but in spite of the “alliance” it was refused. It was owing to the efforts of Mr. de Zayas,
the caricaturist, that the carvings reached New York, and it is also worthy of record that he
managed the shipment at the historic moment when most Americans abroad were parting from
their luggage indefinitely.
Rene Guy DuBois in “Arts and Decoration”:
Behind the masque worn by Alfred Stieglitz, which frowns down from a tremendous height
at visitors in the little gallery of No. 291, I am inclined to detect a somewhat sardonic grin.
Mr. Stieglitz says that he showed the work of Brancusi and Picasso before the work of the
Primitive Blacks because these men uncovered, by preceding them, an interest in the blacks
that would, otherwise, have remained blanketed. Personally at the exhibition of “Statuary in
Wood by African Savages” we found the root of Brancusi’s handicraft more directly than that
of Picasso. My interest in the work of the blacks may have been increased by the previous
view of Brancusi while the interest of the work of Brancusi, who happens to be a European,
was entirely destroyed. It is very likely that without that grin Mr. Stieglitz would not have
shown, in the works of the blacks, the ancient models of Brancusi’s modern work. Of course
there is the possibility that Mr. Stieglitz meant to be amiable and was perfectly innocent.
On the other hand, we like our dogs to be thoroughbreds, to inherit physical traits from similar
physics, to have pure blood. It may be folly to demand that men’s minds be kept pure, that
the children of their minds be thoroughbreds. It seems to me that the children of Brancusi’s
mind, part ancient and part modern, savage and civilized, European and African, black and
white, are not thoroughbreds. That may be the fault, at the same time we must not forget
that the breed of the grayhound was improved by the introduction of the blood of the bull dog.

Charles H. Caffin in the “N. Y. American”:
Some recent drawings and paintings by Picasso and by Braque are being shown in the gallery
of the Photo-Secession, No. 291 Fifth Avenue. The two men are friends and work in common,
Picasso being the leading spirit. His is, in fact, the most original, intrepid and logical mind
among all those which today are bent upon intellectualizing their sensations in pictorial terms.
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