Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1917 (Heft 49-50))

It had been planned to hold three more exhibitions during the
season. The work for them was ready, but the exhibitions were un-
avoidably held over. The exhibitions referred to were: The New
Work, Photographs, by Paul Strand; Photographic Portraits and A
Series of Photographs taken out of the Back Window of “291”,
(covering ten years of work), by Alfred Stieglitz; Oil Paintings, recent
work, by Alfred Maurer.

Chas. H. Caffin in the CCN. Y. American”:
At the Photo-Secession Gallery, 291 Fifth avenue, is an exhibition of water-
colors and drawings by Georgia S. Engelhard, a child of ten years old. She is
described as “unguided, untaught”; that is to say, her parents and friends have
kept her from any kind of direct teaching or criticism. They have permitted her
instinct of self-expression to unfold freely, subject only to the suggestions of
environment, which has included illustrated books and magazines, and occasional
visits to the Metropolitan Museum. These pictures represent gleanings of her
playwork from her fourth to her tenth year.
Clearly she is an exceptional child, which however does not imply that she
differs from other children in kind, but in the degree in which her faculties of obser-
vation, reasoning and sensibility are intensified beyond the general wont of children.
There are some paintings here that in such essentials of expression as color-har-
mony, space-composition, movement and even spiritual suggestion are as beautiful
as need be. And they are complete, to the degree to which one may believe the
concept to have been felt; and that degree will compare favorably with what is
reached by the average adult artist.
For a child’s will is the “wind’s will” and the thoughts of a child are apt to
be “long, long thoughts.”
Free as the wind is the play of the spirit in some of these paintings, while
others reach a depth of emotional expression that would be astonishing if one did
not know the capacity of childhood to play with sadness. Others, again, reveal
a largeness of feeling that is startling until one realizes that they were done at Lake
George, where the child’s instinct was in communion with the grandeur of nature.
And it is in its reaffirmation of the miracle of instinct; of the natural habit of
the child’s mind, before it is clipped and cribbed by convention, that this exhibition
is so profoundly interesting. How it uncovers the potentialities of human nature,
could it be allowed in Bergson’s happy phrase, to recreate self by self; to evolve
out of the mystery of itself in a free and truly sane environment! Also, what an
irony it casts upon the world’s methods of instruction: On the one hand, its steam-
rolling of the individual to an average level, and, on the other, its pernicious forcing
of culture.
The exhibition, in fact, teems with suggestive significance in many directions.

Chas. H. Caffin, in the “N. Y. American”:
An exhibition of paintings by S. Macdonald Wright is being held at the Photo-
Secession Gallery, No. “291” Fifth avenue.
“A clean little show,” is the phrase into which I found my net impression
shaping itself. For, presented without preliminary drum-whacking or portentous
enunciation of some new ’ism, it demonstrates a clear-cut purpose, the direction of
which is as lucid as it is interesting. It illustrates, in fact, a chapter, seven years
long, in an artist’s investigations into certain principles of more abstract expression.
And since this particular artist has a keen mentality, as well as subtle sensibility,
the various processes of his evolution are revealed with an orderliness of growth that
is very illuminating.

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