International studio (58.1916)

Lottis C. Tiffany

and make one know that this is a nude figure.
The small bronze standing figures would be
stronger, were they more simple. But there is a
wax figure of a woman in one of the glass cases,
with a most beautiful face, carved in wood. This
is an exquisite piece of work. It shows Mr.
Kratina’s ability to work in the small figures as
well as in the life size, which cannot be said of
many sculptors.
The exhibition of colour prints, by Arthur
Wesley Dow, shown in the middle room of the
Studios, was of unusual interest.
These prints were of three kinds. In what we
may call Class A, the designs are cut upon the flat
side of a wood block and are printed in water
colours, using the Japanese printer’s disk called
a buren. The special purpose of this method,
Mr. Dow states, is to obtain a vibrating quality
of surface and a harmony of colours. In Class B,
the designs are cut upon linoleum and printed
with inks upon a large hand press. In Class C,
the designs are cut upon type-high wood and
printed upon an ordinary printing press. The
purpose of this last method is to show that the
common job press may be used by the artist as
a tool and that it is possible to get fine relations
of tone and surface by this means.
JOUIS C. TIFFANY
The friends who came to congratulate
Mr. Louis C. Tiffany on his birthday were grati-
fied with a masque in pantomime, in which the
resources of magical lights, cast upon stalwart
men and beautiful women (many of them models
who had posed for artists in the audience) were
lavished with a skill rarely shown on the stage.
“The Quest of Beauty” was conducted by the
painter Joseph Lindon Smith, nor did the masque
belie his reputation as a manager. But the re-
marks of the host when he was compelled to
answer the toast of the President of the Academy
of Design showed that he has not failed to observe
the tendencies in modern art.
“What is the Quest of Beauty? What else is
the goal that an artist sets before him, but that
same spirit of beauty! Who can give the formula
for it? Are there not as many different paths to
it as there are workmen, and are there not as
many different definitions of beauty, as there are
artists? And yet I wish to express what I have
found in art. How can I say briefly what I have

been striving to express in art during my life?
“Literature and the Drama express the sensa-
tions of tragedy and romance—but not with con-
tinuity and lasting effect. Art interprets the
beauty of ideas and of visible things, making
them concrete and lasting. When the savage
searches for the gems from the earth or the pearls
from the sea to decorate his person, or when he
decorates the utensils of war or peace in designs
and colours, he becomes an artist in embryo, for
he has turned his face to the quest of beauty.
“Art starts from an instinct in all—-stronger in
one than another—and that instinct leads to the
fixing of beauty in one of a hundred ways. But,
if we look closer, we find some artists are drawn
aside from the pursuit of beauty to worship the
idol of technique, though only a small part of the
effectiveness of a work in art can be credited to
technique. The thirteenth century makers of
stained glass were great because they saw and re-
produced beauty from the skies and stars—the
gems and rugs; they translated the beauty into
the speech of stained glass. In later days, ignor-
ing the beauty of the glass by using paint, their
successors destroyed by this technique the beauty
for which they were striving.
“If I may be forgiven a word about my own
work, I would merely say that I have always
striven to fix beauty in wood or stone or glass or
pottery, in oil or water colour, by using whatever
seemed fittest for the expression of beauty; that
has been my creed, and I see no reason to change
it. It seems as if the artists who place all their
energies on technique have nothing left over for
the more important matter—the pursuit of
beauty. The ‘Modernists,’ as they are called for
want of a better term, wander after curiosities
of technique, vaguely hoping they may light on
some invention which will make them famous.
They do not belong to art; they are untrained
inventors of processes of the arts.
“One thing more—it seems to me that the
majority of critics miss the chance of doing good
by failing to understand the situation; too many
of them waste their time in disapproval of what
they dislike, instead of looking for what they can
honestly admire. The public thinks that a critic
is a person who attacks and condemns; a critic
should be one who discriminates. The critic who
can do good is one w’ho does not neglect the high
lights for the shadows, but strives to find the best
points in each work of art.”

LXIII