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

Judging by the work we should say that none of these young children are especially gifted
and none possess the imaginative faculty to an astonishing degree. Probably they are just
ordinary, healthy, happy-go-lucky youngsters. Nevertheless their work hung about upon the
walls of a picture gallery makes an attractive display and is not in the least tiresome, as the work
of profound and uninspired adults often is. One thing is common to all the young people,
they get good color. They almost always make pleasing designs too.
These children, it may be presumed, are not of gentle birth and have not been carefully
fed upon tales of old knights, fairy lore and kings nor have they picked up from Nurse graphic
suggestions of pirates, ghosts and the place that bad little boys and girls who do not behave go
to. The field of their expression is rather limited in consequence.
Most of the pictures are scenes about the city; and the effect of crowds of motor cars
upon the avenues is never slighted. In the compact masses of buildings the garage is usually
labelled, and in one picture, the “subway motif” is made to look like an illustration to Fox's,
“Book of Martyrs.” One of the two circus pictures presents quite a symphony of childish
pleasures. The group of head balancers balanced upon a live pig is something, no doubt, that
one would like to see, rather than a close transcript of something that has been seen.
Subtle grasp of realistic detail, however, is shown in the stolid behavior of the people
upon the front seats and the more or less frenzied appreciation of the people upon the back rows.
That is very true to life. Another truthful touch is the slow movement of the piebald horse
from whose bare back the smiling lady leaps through a paper hoop. This extreme slowness of
the barebacked horses in the circus is something new in art. The adult artists, for some reasons
have always kept up the polite fiction of their great speed.
One battle scene is evidently the work of an unbelieving neutral. A hot engagement is
going on in the streets of a mountain village and the cannon are pouring out shrapnel and what-
ever else it is that they pour out, but the casualties are of the slightest. Only one female has
toppled over. The bystanders who fill the streets are “more than usual calm” and the only sign
of anything extraordinary going on is betrayed by the architecture. The village houses give a
strange effect of being just about ready to fly off over the hill.
There is a very evident and widely felt impulse to drape the full responsibility for the
cubistic movement upon the shoulders of Arthur B. Davies. This is highly complimentary to
Mr. Davies, but not at all considerate of the feelings of Alfred Stieglitz. Mr. Stieglitz is quite
willing to share the burden. But no one seems to mind his being a cubist. Perhaps it’s be-
cause he always was one. When he first swam into our ken he was a something which we
afterward learned to call by that name.
But Mr. Davies once was not a cubist. Once he was a rebellious poet who kept up his
rebellion until the public capitulated (as it always does to persistent poets), and just before he
became a cubist he had approached perilously near being a best seller. To have a best seller
turn cubist of course is a very different thing from the cubism of a peripatetic philosopher like
Mr. Stieglitz.
Mr. Stieglitz's cubism doesn't interfere with business. People who buy the outlandish
productions he recommends do so at their own risk. They may be even said to deserve the
losses that shall be theirs when the people rise in their might and wipe cubism from the face
of the earth, as Mme. de Thebes, in one of her recent trances, declared they will.
The case of Mr. Davies is complicated enormously by the fact that a great many people
bought his work in times past never dreaming that he was to turn cubist. If it were just a case
of “saving their faces” they could flop too with their poet, and nothing loath; but what would
become then of the other pictures in their collection not by Mr. Davies? You see the rub?
Who cares to sacrifice one’s whole collection for the sake of one artist? It is far more practical
to break the proud poet's will and force him back into the traces, they finally decide. Once
forced back into harness his future output may not be so spirited, but at least it won’t jeopardize
his value on the market.
Side by side with this idea of Mr. Davies' culpability runs another idea equally curious,
that all that there is of cubism is here in America, and if it can only be run to earth the move-
ment will be done for. Which is droll! Cubism is in the air. Musicians feel it, poets express
it; the dancers reflect it, as you will see next year when the Ballet Russe comes to town; and
business men make considerable money out of it. Of course it won't last. Nothing lasts.
Even the Barbizon School as a movement has faded out. Therefore, why worry?
Mr. Davies’ aggregation of modernists now performing in three of Mr. Montross’ rectangu-
lar galleries have by no means a monopoly upon the cubes. There are many others right in this

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