ason 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 reali