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

that one brain and that one pair of hands. Perhaps of them all the most engaging is the Picasso
of“Le Lapin Agile,” 1905, in which the painter in Pierrot costume sits at table with a man and
a woman in the famous Paris cafe.
Then there is the painter who followed Daumier with strong contrasts of dark and light
and rich modeling. And, further back, the painter of the young girl with her head crowned
with flowers. It’s a long, long road to the comparatively new Picasso with his figures and
letters of the alphabet and pieces of newspaper and his cubistic drawing and “absolute paint-
ing.” He can be poignant, the “Dead Pierrot” showed that, he can draw vice as cruelly as
Balzac, those “Apaches” in the etching of 1905 prove it; he is sensitive to personal significance
and cognizant of decorative values, both qualities are in the “Seated Pierrot” of 1903; and
since most of us grant that the writing of experience is never wholly erased from a still sound
mind, no doubt we should assume that the poignancy and cruelty and tenderness are all in the
complicated designs with their beautiful flickering lights and darks and their interesting and
tremendously difficult perspectives. We of the public live by faith alone, and it is not a faith
to come at easily in the case of Picasso, yet his sincerity and his skill are both so apparent, that
the absence of a clearly defined artistic meaning in his work is unbelievable.
At the Photo-Secession Galleries in one of the inner rooms are half-a-dozen drawings,
and an impression of the “Apaches” illustrating the progress of Picasso, synthetically pre-
sented. This inner room is the magnet for students of art.

Peyton Boswell in the “N. Y. Herald”:
Within the last few days five exhibitions involving the extreme in art have been opened
in the New York galleries and these do not include the Matisse exhibition. So eager have
been the galleries to show the new art that Alfred Stieglitz, of the Photo-Secession Galleries,
No. 291 Fifth Avenue, who showed the first extreme art seen in New York, said he might have
to devote his gallery to exhibitions of academic work in order to escape being obvious.
“If the worst comes to the worst,” he said yesterday, “and the members of the National
Academy of Design can find no other place to exhibit their pictures I will cheerfully give to
them the use of No. 291. An exhibition of work by Mr. Edwin Blashfield and Mr. Will Low
might help a lot to start the pendulum swinging back the other way.
The Photo-Secession Galleries are now showing portraits done in the new manner by
Misses Marion H. Beckett and Katharine N. Rhoades. Not much liberty has been taken
with form by these artists, but they have used strident and striking color to the limit. Typical
is Miss Rhoades’ “Portrait of Mary V. Pyle,” which has green eyes, but no other monstrous
element. An outdoor flower piece, “Voulangis,” by the same artist, is a striking piece of bright
color. Among Miss Beckett’s portraits is one of Mr. Eduard J. Steichen, carrying a stalk of
hollyhock over his shoulder, reminding one of the flower pictures by this artist shown at the
Knoedler Galleries.
Arthur Hoeber in the “N. Y. Globe”:
Two young women are showing at the little gallery of the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth
Avenue, and they depart considerably from the traditions of these rooms, which have been given
over for some years now to the manifestation of the more revolutionary groups, for while these
ladies are by no means conventional, they have at least clung to certain acknowledged notions
of human anatomy and construction, to resemblances of men and women, and given recog-
nizable likenesses, particularly in the case of the painter, Eduard Steichen, limned by Marion
H. Beckett, in most agreeable color and with a nice sense of the personality of the man, a really
decorative canvas of force and distinction. Katharine N. Rhoades, the second of the pair,
has painted Mrs. Steichen, not perhaps as successfully as the husband has been presented;
but she has a standing nude that is most interesting. There are some landscapes and more
portraits that make up the display, which may be seen for some little time.
Meanwhile Mr. Stieglitz has devoted the current number of his publication, Camera
Work, which may be said to be the organ of these galleries, to the expression of opinion of some
sixty-five people, in various walks of life, as to what the place means to them, and this issue
contains no illustrations whatsoever. Some of the writers have expressed themselves in poetry,
others in prose. With but a single exception there is deep appreciation for the freedom of
thought and the liberty offered to the exhibitors here, but mainly it is a note of friendliness,

18