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

borough who do it too. Four other galleries in town at this moment are given over to the
moderns, four, that is if we are to include the exhibition of children’s drawings in the Photo-
Secession Gallery, as Mr. Stieglitz says we must. But Mr. Davies’ crowd have the faculty of
arousing more philistinic ire than the others. This does not prove them better, but does prove
them useful propagandists for the cause.
The experts on “modernism” and the critics have all taken the Montross exhibition
rather coolly, due probably to having drunk too deeply at the French well of cubism in the
Carroll Galleries, which has been bubbling there all winter, but Mr. Chase and Mr. Beckwith,
who have been to see the home show, found themselves quite as irritated as ever and expressed
their disapprobation more successfully than ever, to the great joy of the artists, who feel the
work therefore has not been in vain.
The special innovation of the show is the collection of small carvings in wood by Mr.
Davies. These met with instant appreciation, and I believe have all been sold. One gentle-
man who journeyed over from Philadelphia on the opening day did not take an early enough
train, for the piece he desired, a gilded little goddess, had been sold before his arrival. Most
of them have been richly colored, so that they seem at present as rich as jades and lapis.
Charles H. Caffin in the “N. Y. American”:
A third exhibition of children’s drawings is being held at the Little Gallery of the Photo-
Secession, No. 291 Fifth Avenue. It is distinguished from the previous ones by the fact that
in this case the drawings are not “spontaneous productions.” Although made after school
hours by boys of one of the city’s public elementary schools, varying in age from eight to four-
teen, “they have been influenced by the suggestions of teacher and fellow pupils.”
Their teachers are Dr. Joseph Cohen and Miss Eda L. Puckhaber, who in the prospectus
of the exhibition condemn the “prevailing art instruction,” but omit to describe their own.
Accordingly one has to study the drawings at a disadvantage of not knowing how direct or
indirect the suggestions may have been and, therefore, to what extent they actually represent
the point of view and feeling of children.
Most of them illustrate the child’s delight in circumstantial representation; street scenes,
for example, frequently appearing, offering intricate and profuse arrangements of houses and
much activity of vehicles and figures. In all of these the feeling of pattern, as well as of life
and action, is very marked.
Then there are others in which the pattern assumes a greater simplicity and often a quite
remarkable feeling for organic unity. These are either interiors, sometimes showing one room
opening into another, or studies of fruit and other objects.
In some of these the color schemes are so notably organized and so handsome, that the
question of the amount and kind of influence exerted by the teacher becomes a most important
factor in estimating them as productions of the child-mind. In fact, it would have been fairer
all round if the teachers in question had enlightened us as to their theory of instruction, instead
of attacking another, the products of which are not given in evidence.

Willard Huntington Wright in the “Forum”:
Still another type of artist who is striving for a personal vision, or rather, I should say,
who feels that his vision is different from any man now painting, is Oscar Bluemner. Formerly
an architect, the work of this man bears traces of a certain coldness and stiffness due perhaps to
his early training with mechanical draughtsman’s instruments. His desire is to produce on
canvas, by a highly synthetic method of picturization, the actual emotional experiences he
senses before nature. Highly intelligent, he realizes that this can never be done by merely
copying what is before him. He recognizes that the actual volume of emotion one has in the
out-of-doors cannot be transmitted to a small square of cloth by copying values. He therefore
strives to heighten all color forms and lights to such a degree that, in the immensely restricted
space of a picture, their intensity will overshadow the sensitive spectator even as he is awed
by nature’s effects. With Bluemner there is a desire for bigness, for extent of effect—an ambi-
tion to condense and concentrate, as it were, into a small area the forces of nature, which by
their intensity will produce the colossal volume of emotion we have before an actual landscape.
Here is a highly commendable ideal, and an original one. At present Bluemner sacrifices much
toward the achievement of his ambition. But this is only natural, for compromise is always the
path of him who is not yet master of himself. Bluemner would be the first to repudiate the


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