eyebrow, a leg, a tree trunk, a body, a breast, a hand, any part being
equal to the whole in its power to tell the story, could be made as
interesting, more so indeed than all the famous people in existence.
It doesn't matter to us in the least that Morgan and Richard Strauss
helped fill a folio alongside of Maeterlinck and such like persons.
All this was, of course, in keeping with the theatricism of the period
in which it was produced, which is one of the best things to be said
of it. But we do know that Whistler helped ruin photography along
with Wilde who helped ruin esthetics. Everyone has his office
nevertheless. As a consequence, Alfred Stieglitz was told by the
prevailing geniuses of that time that he was a back number because of
his strict adherence to the scientific nature of the medium, because
he didn't manipulate his plate beyond the strictly technical
advantages it offered, and it was not therefore a fashionable addition
to the kind of thing that was being done by the assuming ones at that
time. The exhibition of the life-work of Alfred Stieglitz in March,
1921, at the Anderson Galleries, New York, was a huge revelation even
to those of us who along with our own ultra modern interests had found
a place for good unadulterated photography in the scheme of our
appreciation of the art production of this time.
I can say without a qualm that photography has always been a real
stimulus to me in all the years I have been personally associated with
it through the various exhibitions held along with those of modern
painting at the gallery of the Photo-Secession, or more intimately
understood as "291". Photography was an interesting foil to the kind
of veracity that painting is supposed to express, or rather to say,
was then supposed to express; for painting like all other ideas has
changed vastly in the last ten years, and even very much since the
interval created by the war. I might have learned this anywhere else,
but I did get it from the Stieglitz camera realizations with more
than perhaps the expected frequency, and I am willing to assert now
that there are no portraits in existence, not in all the history of
portrait realization either by the camera or in painting, which so
definitely present, and in many instances with an almost haunting
clairvoyance, the actualities existing in the sitter's mind and body
and soul. These portraits are for me without parallel therefore in
this particular. And I make bold with another assertion, that from our
modern point of view the Stieglitz photographs are undeniable works of
art, as are also the fine photographs of the younger men like Charles
Sheeler and Paul Strand. Sheeler, being also one of our best modern
painters, has probably added to his photographic work a different type
of sensibility by reason of his experience in the so-called creative
medium of painting. It is, as we know, brain matter that counts in a
work of art, and we have dispensed once and for all with the silly
notion that a work of art is made by hand. Art is first and last of
all, a product of the intelligence.
I think the photographers must at least have been a trifle upset with
this Stieglitz Exhibition. I know that many of the painters of the day
were noticeably impressed. There was much to concern everyone there,
in any degree that can be put upon us as interested spectators. For
myself, I care nothing for the gift of interpretation, and far less
for that dreadful type of effete facility which produces a kind of
hocus-pocus technical brilliancy which fuddles the eye with a
trickery, and produces upon the untrained and uncritical mind a kind
of unintelligent hypnotism. Art these days is a matter of scientific
comprehension of reality, not a trick of the hand or the old-fashioned
manipulation of a brush or a tool. I am interested in presentation
pure and simple. All things that are living are expression and
therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that
is encumbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my
point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no
handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is. When a
picture looks like the life of the world, it is apt to be a fair
picture or a good one, but a bad picture is nothing but a bad picture
and it is bound to become worse as we think of it. And so for my own
pleasure I have consulted the kodak as furnishing me with a better
picture of life than many pictures I have seen by many of the
so-called very good artists, and I have always delighted in the
rotograph series of the Sunday papers because they are as close to
life as any superficial representation can hope to be.
It was obvious then that many of those who saw the Stieglitz
photographs, and there were large crowds of them, were non-plussed by
the unmistakable authenticity of experience contained in them. If you
stopped there you were of course mystified, but there is no mystery
whatever in these productions, for they are as clear and I shall even
go so far as to say as objective as the daylight which produced them,
and aside from certain intimate issues they are impersonal as it is
possible for an artist to be. It is this quality in them which makes
them live for me as realities in the art world of modern time. All art
calls for one variety of audacity or another and so these photographs
unfold one type of audacity which is not common among works of art,
excepting of course in highly accentuated instances of autographic
revelation. It is the intellectual sympathy with all the subjects on
exhibition which is revealed in these photographs: A kind of spiritual
diagnosis which is seldom or never to be found among the photographers
and almost never among the painters of the conventional portrait. This
ability, talent, virtue, or genius, whatever you may wish to name it,
is without theatricism and therefore without spectacular demonstration
either of the sitter or the method employed in rendering them.
It is never a matter of arranging cheap and practically unrelated
externals with Alfred Stieglitz. I am confident it can be said that he
has never in his life made a spectacular photograph. His intensity
runs in quite another channel altogether. It is far closer to the
clairvoyant exposure of the psychic aspects of the moment, as
contained in either the persons or the objects treated of. With these
essays in character of Alfred Stieglitz, you have a series of types
who had but one object in mind, to lend themselves for the use of the
machine in order that a certain problem might be accurately rendered
with the scientific end of the process in view, and the given
actuality brought to the surface when possible. I see nothing in these
portraits beyond this. I understand them technically very little only
that I am aware that I have not for long, and perhaps never, seen
plates that hold such depths of tonal value and structural
relationship of light and shade as are contained in the hundred and
fifty prints on exhibition in the Anderson Galleries. Art is a vastly
new problem and this is the first thing which must be learned.
Precisely as we learn that a certain type of painting ended in the
history of the world with Cézanne.
There is an impulse now in painting toward photographic veracity of
experience as is so much in evidence in the work of an artist of such
fine perceptions as Ingres, with a brushing aside of all old-fashioned
notions of what constitutes artistic experience. There is a deliberate
revolt, and photography as we know it in the work of Alfred Stieglitz
and the few younger men like Strand and Sheeler is part of the new
esthetic anarchism which we as younger painters must expect to make
ourselves responsible for. It must be remembered you know, that there
has been a war, and art is in a condition of encouraging and
stimulating renascence, and we may even go so far as to say that it is
a greater world issue than it was previous to the great catastrophe.
And also, it must be heralded that as far as art is concerned the end
of the world has been seen. The true artist, if he is intelligent, is
witness of this most stimulating truth that confronts us. We cannot
hope to function esthetically as we did before all this happened,
because we are not the same beings intellectually. This does not mean
in relation to photography that all straight photography is good. It
merely means that the kind of photography I must name "Fifth Avenue"
art, is a conspicuous species of artistic bunkum, and must be
recognized as such.
Photographers must know that fogging and blurring the image is
curtailing the experience of it. It is a foolish notion that
mystification is of any value. Flattery is one of the false elements
that enter into the making of a work of art among the artists of
doubtful integrity, but this is often if not always the commercial
element that enters into it. There is a vast difference between this
sort of representation and that which is to be found in Greek
sculpture which is nothing short of conscious plastic organization.
These figures were set up in terms of the prevailing systems of
proportion. Portraits were likewise "arranged" through the artistry of
the painter in matters of decoration for the great halls of the
periods in which they were hung. They were studies on a large scale of
ornamentation. Their beauty lies chiefly in the gift of execution. In
these modern photographs of Stieglitz and his followers there is an
engaging directness which cannot be and must not be ignored. They do
for once give in the case of the portraits, and I mean chiefly of
course the Stieglitz portraits, the actuality of the sitter without
pose or theatricism of any sort, a rather rare thing to be said of the
modern photograph.
Stieglitz, therefore, despite his thirty or more years of
experimentation comes up among the moderns by virtue of his own
personal attitude toward photography, and toward his, as well as its,
relation to the subject. His creative power lies in his ability to
diagnose the character and quality of the sitter as being peculiar to
itself, as a being in relation to itself seen by his own clarifying
insight into general and well as special character and characteristic.
It need hardly be said that he knows his business technically for he
has been acclaimed sufficiently all over the world by a series of
almost irrelevant medals and honours without end. The Stieglitz
exhibition is one that should have been seen by everyone regardless of
any peculiar and special predilection for art. These photos will have
opened the eye and the mind of many a sleeping one as to what can be
done by way of mechanical device to approach the direct charm of life
in nature.
The moderns have long since congratulated Alfred Stieglitz for his
originality in the special field of his own creative endeavor. It will
matter little whether the ancients do or not. His product is a fine
testimonial to his time and therefore this is his contribution to his
time. He finds himself, and perhaps to his own embarrassment even,
among the best modern artists; for Stieglitz as I understand him cares
little for anything beyond the rendering of the problem involved which
makes him of course scientific first and whatever else afterward,
which is the hope of the modern artists of all movements, regardless.
Incidentally it may be confided he is an artistic idol of the Dadaists
which is at least a happy indication of his modernism. If he were to
shift his activities to Paris, he would be taken up at once for his
actual value as modern artist expressing present day notions of actual
things. Perhaps he will not care to be called Dada, but it is
nevertheless true. He has ridden his own vivacious hobby-horse with as
much liberty, and one may even say license, as is possible for one
intelligent human being. There is no space to tell casually of his
various aspects such as champion billiard player, racehorse
enthusiast, etcetera. This information would please his dadaistic
confrères, if no one else shows signs of interest.
SOME WOMEN ARTISTS IN MODERN PAINTING
It is for the purpose of specialization that the term woman is
herewith applied to the idea of art in painting. Art is for anyone
naturally who can show degree of mastery in it. There have been a
great many women poets and musicians as well as actors, though
singularly enough the women painters of history have been few, and for
that matter in question of proportion remain so. Whatever the wish may
be in point of dismissing the idea of sex in painting, there has so
often been felt among many women engaging to express themselves in it,
the need to shake off marked signs of masculinity, and even
brutishness of attack, as denoting, and it must be said here, a
factitious notion of power. Power in painting does not come from
muscularity of arm; it comes naturally from the intellect. There are a
great many male painters showing too many signs of femininity in their
appreciation and the conception of art in painting. Art is neither
male nor female. Nevertheless, it is pleasing to find women artists
such as I wish to take up here, keeping to the charm of their own
feminine perceptions and feminine powers of expression. It is their
very femininity which makes them distinctive in these instances. This
does not imply lady-like approach or womanly attitude of moral. It
merely means that their quality is a feminine quality.
In the work of Madame Delaunay Terck, who is the wife of Delaunay, the
French Orphiste, which I have not seen since the war came on, one can
say that she was then running her husband a very close second for
distinction in painting and intelligence of expression. When two
people work so closely in harmony with each other, it is and will
always remain a matter of difficulty in knowing just who is the real
expressor of an idea. Whatever there is of originality in the idea of
Orphisme shall be credited to Delaunay as the inventor, but whether
his own examples are more replete than those of Mme. Delaunay Terck is
not easy of statement. There was at that time a marked increase of
virility in production over those of Delaunay himself, but these are
matters of private personal attack. Her Russian temper was probably
responsible for this, at least no doubt, assisted considerably. There
was nevertheless at that time marked evidence that she was in mastery
of the idea of Orphisme both as to conception and execution. She
showed greater signs of virility in her approach than did Delaunay
himself. There was in his work a deal of what Gertrude Stein then
called "white wind", a kind of thin escaping in the method. The
designs did not lock so keenly. His work had always typical charm if
it had not always satisfying vigor. His "Tour Eiffel" and a canvas
called "Rugby" I think, I remember as having more grace than depth,
but one may say nevertheless, real distinction.
In the exchanging of ideas so intimately as has happened splendidly
between Picasso and Braque, which is in the nature of professional
dignity among artists, there is bound to be more or less confusion
even to the highly perceptive artist and this must therefore confuse
the casual observer and layman. So it is, or was at that time with the
painting of Robert Delaunay and Mme. Delaunay Terck; what you learned
in this instance was that the more vigorous of the pictures were hers.
She showed the same strength and style in her work as in her
interesting personality which was convincing without being too
strained or forced; she was most probably an average Russian woman
which as one knows means a great deal as to intelligence and personal
power.
MARIE LAURENCIN
With Marie Laurencin there was a greater sense of personal and
individual creation. One can never quite think of anyone in connection
with her pictures other than the happy reminiscence of Watteau. With
her work comes charm in the highest, finest sense; there is nothing
trivial about her pictures, yet they abound in all the graces of the
18th Century. Her drawings and paintings with spread fans and now and
then a greyhound or a gazelle opposed against them in design, hold
grace and elegance of feeling that Watteau would certainly have
sanctioned. She brings up the same sense of exquisite gesture and
simplicity of movement with a feeling for the romantic aspect of
virginal life which exists nowhere else in modern painting. She
eliminates all severities of intellect, and super-imposes wistful
charm of idea upon a pattern of the most delicate beauty. She is
essentially an original which means that she invents her own
experience in art.
Marie Laurencin concerns herself chiefly with the idea of girlish
youth, young girls gazing toward each other with fans spread or
folded, and fine braids of hair tied gently with pale cerise or pale
blue ribbon, and a pearl-like hush of quietude hovers over them. She
arrests the attention by her fine reticence and holds one's interest
by the veracity of esthetic experience she evinces in her least or
greatest painting or drawing. She paints with miniature sensibility
and knows best of all what to leave out. She is eminently devoid of
excessiveness either in pose or in treatment, with the result that
your eye is refreshingly cooled with the delicate process.
That Marie Laurencin keeps in the grace of French children is in no
way surprising if you know the incomparable loveliness of them. Apart
from her modernistic excellence as artist, she conveys a poetry so
essentially French in quality that you wish always for more and more
of it. It is the light breath of the Luxembourg gardens and the
gardens of the Tuilleries coming over you once more and the same
grace in child-life as existed in the costly games at Versailles among
the grown-ups depicted so superbly by Watteau and his most worthy
followers, Lancret and Pater, in whom touch is more breath than
movement. It is a sensitive and gracefully aristocratic creation Marie
Laurencin produces for us, one that makes the eye avid of more
experience and the mind of more of its subtlety. It is an essentially
beautiful and satisfying contribution to modern painting, this
nacreous cubism of Marie Laurencin.
GEORGIA O'KEEFFE[1]
With Georgia O'Keeffe one takes a far jump into volcanic crateral
ethers, and sees the world of a woman turned inside out and gaping
with deep open eyes and fixed mouth at the rather trivial world of
living people. "I wish people were all trees and I think I could enjoy
them then," says Georgia O'Keeffe. Georgia O'Keeffe has had her feet
scorched in the laval effusiveness of terrible experience; she has
walked on fire and listened to the hissing of vapors round her person.
The pictures of O'Keeffe, the name by which she is mostly known, are
probably as living and shameless private documents as exist, in
painting certainly, and probably in any other art. By shamelessness I
mean unqualified nakedness of statement. Her pictures are essential
abstractions as all her sensations have been tempered to abstraction
by the too vicarious experience with actual life. She had seen hell,
one might say, and is the Sphynxian sniffer at the value of a secret.
She looks as if she had ridden the millions of miles of her every
known imaginary horizon, and has left all her horses lying dead in
their tracks. All in quest of greater knowledge and the greater sense
of truth. What these quests for truth are worth no one can precisely
say, but the tendency would be to say at least by one who has gone far
to find them out that they are not worthy of the earth or sky they are
written on. Truth has soiled many an avenue, it has left many a
drawing room window open. It has left the confession box filled with
bones. However, Georgia O'Keeffe pictures are essays in experience
that neither Rops nor Moreau nor Baudelaire could have smiled away.
[Footnote 1: American.--Ed.]
She is far nearer to St. Theresa's version of life as experience than
she could ever be to that of Catherine the Great or Lucrezia Borgia.
Georgia O'Keeffe wears no poisoned emeralds. She wears too much white;
she is impaled with a white consciousness. It is not without
significance that she wishes to paint red in white and still have it
look like red. She thinks it can be done and yet there is more red in
her pictures than any other color at present; though they do, it must
be said, run to rose from ashy white with oppositions of blue to keep
them companionable and calm. The work of Georgia O'Keeffe startles by
its actual experience in life. This does not imply street life or sky
life or drawing room life, but life in all its huge abstraction of
pain and misery and its huge propensity for silencing the spirit of
adventure. These pictures might also be called expositions of psychism
in color and movement.
Without some one to steady her, I think O'Keeffe would not wish the
company of more tangible things than trees. She knows why she despises
existence, and it comes from facing the acute dilemma with more
acuteness than it could comprehend. She is vastly over-size as to
experience in the spiritual geometric of the world. All this gives her
painting as clean an appearance as it is possible to imagine in
painting. She soils nothing with cheap indulgence of wishing
commonplace things. She has wished too large and finds the world
altogether too small in comparison.
What the future holds for Georgia O'Keeffe as artist depends upon
herself. She is modern by instinct and therefore cannot avoid
modernity of expression. It is not willed, it is inevitable. When she
looks at a person or a thing she senses the effluvia that radiate from
them and it is by this that she gauges her loves and hates or her
tolerance of them. It is enough that her pictures arrive with a
strange incongruous beauty which, though metaphysically an import,
does not disconcert by this insistence. She knows the psychism of
patterns and evolves them with strict regard for the pictural aspects
in them which save them from banality as ideas. She has no preachment
to offer and utters no rubbish on the subject of life and the problem.
She is one of the exceptional girls of the world both in art and in
life. As artist she is as pure and free from affectation as in life
she is relieved from the necessity of it.
* * * * *
If there are other significant women in modern art I am not as yet
familiarized with them. These foregoing women take their place
definitely as artists within the circle of women painters like Le
Brun, Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, and are in advance of them by
being closer to the true appreciation of esthetics in inventing them
for themselves.
REVALUATIONS IN IMPRESSIONISM
In the consideration of the real factors in the impressionistic
movement, we learn that it is not Monet and the younger crew such as
Moret, Maufra, George d'Espagnat and Guillaumin who give us the real
weight of this esthetic argument. We find Monet going in for
hyper-sentimentalized iridiscences which culminate or seem to
culminate in the "Lily" series until we are forced to say he has let
us out, once and for all, as far as any further interest in the theory
with which he was concerned. We are no longer held by these artificial
and overstrained hues, and we find the younger followers offering
little or nothing to us save an obvious integrity of purpose. These
younger men had apparently miscomprehended idiosyncrasies for ideas
and that, save for a certain cleanness of intention, they were
offering scarcely anything of what is to be found by way of
realization in the pictures of a really great colorist like Renoir.