America and Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait/Modern Works of Art
[Doubleday, Doran, $3.50]
ed. by
[Norton, $3.50]
To the museum curator who has been obliged to insure a painting by O’Keefe for ten thousand dollars for public exhibition and a Marin water color for eight thousand, the ascetic virtues of Alfred Stieglitz and the disinterested purity of An American Place, which the Festschrift selected by the Literary Guild describes, come as something of a spiritual refreshment in an all too shoddy world of modern art. But the strange fact that cannot be overlooked despite the fulsome praise of this collective portrait is that Alfred Stieglitz is really a great man and that probably he has been right in the matter of contemporary æsthetics more often than any other critic and ‘patron ’ in the business. To this reviewer, therefore, the chronology of his seventy years, the list of exhibitions, and the amazingly varied bibliography which are included in the appendix are a much greater testimonial to his position in the arts than are the emanations of his twenty-odd Plotinian disciples who lie snugly between the covers of this handsome, magnificently illustrated book.
This genius in photography, who began life in Hoboken and broke into American significance by way of the gymnasium in Karlsruhe and experimental photochemistry at the University of Berlin, has been the most important agitator for the reconciliation of art and science of the past generation. As editor of Camera Work, Camera Notes, founder of the Photo-Secession, and through his gallery, Stieglitz exerted a profound influence upon artists both here and abroad. He was the first person to introduce America to the wonders of Rodin’s water colors and drawings in 1908, the same year in which he presented Matisse to a still more bewildered public. Among his other ‘firsts’ were Gordon Craig, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Negro sculpture. He was the moving spirit in the Armory Show of 1918, but never did he introduce new artists from Europe without pitting them against newly discovered talent in America. Stieglitz was the champion of the new and the difficult to understand, a law unto himself with courage that is vouchsafed to few of us in the arts. When Modern Art became respectable, Stieglitz was nearly forgotten. For this reason, if for no other, this book is timely; for although we may find, as the years roll by and art begins to right itself from the stormy sea of the post-war years, that many of the things for which Stieglitz fought were not worth fighting for, he will nevertheless go down in history as one of the most dynamic personalities in a period when America was threatened with having no art at all.
The Collective Portrait, edited by Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Norman, Paul Rosenfeld, and Harold Rugg, comes nearer to being a Burne-Jones memorial window than anything that has been raised by popular subscription in New York in the twentieth century. The articles on photography are of major importance and Mr. Mumford’s account of the background of metropolitan New York is a valuable record of the time. But the stuttered poesy of so many of the contributors and the shameless adulation of this constellation of intellectuals will not only embarrass the average reader, but should send the blood coursing to the cheeks of the great Dada of American art himself.
The laurels of the month must go to the Museum of Modern Art for Modern Works of Art, its birthday book commemorating its Fifth Anniversary Exhibition. It is the most brilliant of Mr. Barr’s many fine and useful catalogues, a necessary and all too brief summary of what, for better or for worse, has gone on in the world of modernism since the impressionistic seventies. With the exception of Walter Pach’s The Masters of Modern Art, first published in 1924, the student has had virtually no place to turn for historic reference, unless, perhaps, to Stephan Bourgeois’s Catalogue of the Adolph Lewisohn Collection, a privately printed volume, or to the post-impressionistic chapters of the latest Encycloprrdia Britannica section on painting. There is in this brief introduction an almost complete absence of polemic. Mr. Barr states no preferences, voices no objections. It is impersonal, dispassionate, and to the point, yet one reads into it possibly the epitaph of a rebellious art that fought its way to acceptance only to linger in intellectual stagnation.
There is a great need for a Museum of Modern Art. One wonders if the catalogue of its tenth anniversary exhibition will reflect the tacit fatalism of this volume, or whether it may be tempered by a greater faith in the capabilities of the American artist than the past five years of abstract investigation in Europe have grudgingly admitted.
In addition to Mr. Barr’s articles on painting and sculpture there is a preface by A. Conger Goodyear, president of the Museum, and a note on architecture by Philip Johnson.
FRANCIS HENRY TAYLOR