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

upon muted strings, and while certain instructed amateurs see the charm in them and the
sensitive feeling of life such amateurs are few and do not dominate the actual art world as it is.
When such an artist, who is subtle when realistic, throws subjects to the wind and becomes
musical in color it seems to me his audience must still further diminish. To a sincere artist,
however, a small audience is not the tragedy that it is to a charlatan.
I was thinking somewhat of this in the Yamanaka exhibition of color prints because the
foreword of that exhibition contained some pregnant sentences of old Hokusai, the master.
Quoting from memory they were something like this. “At 70 I shall know something about
art, but at 90 I shall know more. At 100 I shall be excellent, but at no I shall be sublime. I
shall be able to reduce life to a single tone, a single line. Let no man mock at these words.”
No man will, I think, any more than he will mock at Mr. Walkowitz’s simplifications.
But I could not resist replying to old Hokusai, “Sublime you will be, but where will your sub-
lime audience be found? So exalted, so perfect an expression of life that it can be resolved into
one line, will be seen, will be felt, only by your equals who have reached no.”
Heaven knows, but few of us survive to that age.
Charles H. Caffin in the “N. Y. American”:
At the Gallery of the Photo-Secession, No. 291 Fifth Avenue, is an exhibition of drawings
and watercolors by A. Walkowitz. It is an exhibition of abstractions.
As the artist explains in a foreword, he reacts to some experience of life, and “if it brings
to me a harmonious sensation, I then try to find the concrete elements that are likely to record
the sensation in visual forms, in the medium of lines, of color shapes, of space division.” And
he adds:
“If my art is true to its purpose, then it should convey to me in graphic terms the feeling
which I received in imaginative terms. * * * As to its content, it should satisfy my need of
creating a record of an experience.”
This, I suppose, differs only in the personal twist of its expression from what might be
said by most artists in explaining their purpose of giving what is practically an abstract render-
ing to their abstract sensations.
It might seem to suggest that in expressing their sensations to their own satisfaction they
have fulfilled their purpose; that whether or no they succeed in making others share their
experience is a matter perhaps not entirely of indifference, but at least of very subordinate
consideration.
An egoist may applaud such an art creed, while the majority of men, who regard art as a
means of communicating from soul to soul the finer experiences of life, will call the creed unsocial.
For by the time a man adopts abstractions to visualize what was originally an abstraction,
he gets a long way from a mutual viewpoint of communication. He is employing symbols;
not, however, such as are familiar by use, but arbitrarily selected for the occasion—arbitrarily,
because he is the sole judge of their fitness and judges their fitness with reference only to his
own feeling. The other man is left to grope for a key to the enigma.
Walkowitz’s use of symbols frequently consists in taking some fragment of form and
repeating it with variations, so that the whole is, as it were, a composition of harmonies and
overtones of some fundamental tone. It is more than a design or pattern, for it involves the
third dimension and is structurally organic, the parts functioning with one another.
It is therefore a living composition and actively affects one’s imagination. But one’s
imagination circulates in a very limited sphere. It may be because of one’s lack of receptive-
ness; yet I suspect that this is precisely how the artist’s own imagination has operated; that it
is essentially an ingrowing imagination.
It revolves, one may believe, around something so intimately personal that it is impossible
for outside imaginations to gain more than a glimmer of the experience. If this be so, it helps
to explain the impression that I myself derive from these drawings. It is one of enticement
rather than realization.
Henry Tyrrell in the “Christian Science Monitor” (Boston):
At Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession loft, No. 291 Fifth Avenue, research work in art is
continually going on. Flere at “291,” a tiny place dedicated to an illimitable thought, there is
much concentration. It is a concentration of various individualities upon one dynamic idea,
that idea being to treat art solely as a living thing in relation to life. A. Walkowitz, whose

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