ties 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 Cezanne.

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 mak