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WINGS December 1934 WINGS


critics, but by sensitive men and women from every walk of life, had also steadily increased.

But still the question persists: What is the man as a complete being?

What is it that baffles about this slight, white-haired figure with the piercing yet gentle brown eyes, the rich deep voice, the vast human understanding and the sudden flashes of wit, -moving quietly through the world in his conventional dark business suit, the old-fashioned black cape- and then as if transformed by some passionate conviction that consumes his whole being, speaking out his challenge, unafraid, clear, penetrating, as if he would tear to pieces what is before him with the very intensity of his words. As such times the black cape itself is as if transformed into monk's garb....

What is it Stieglitz challenges? For one thing, he does not believe that art should be the property of individuals, but that it belongs to the people, if only they will know how to protect what is theirs. He challenges, too, those who say that they care and do not act in connection with what they say they care about. Whether as a child, when Goethe's Faust moved him so deeply and he read it in its entirety time and time again; whether later, as a student, when he was held spellbound by such operas as Meistersinger Tristan, carmen, -and would go to hear them over and over again, even though he had relatively but little money, even though he had to stand in order to go at all, or so that he could take with him friends who had even less money than himself; whether still later when he did not merely claim to admire certain works of art, but actually fought for their creators, he has ever turned his feeling and his word into act. One can trace, in the pattern of his life, endless variations on such themes, in ever growing complexity.

[[image]]
[[caption]] Reproduced from the pages of "Camera Work"

A photograph by D. O. Hill 

HANDYSIDE RITCHIE AND WILLIAM HENNING (1843-46) [[/caption]]

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Even as a child he had a gift for creating, for doing what has not been done before. There are the tales of how when he was still a very young child he would invent new games, of Parchesi, for example, or whatever the game at hand happened to be. He was told that he dare not do this, that there were the rules. he dared- and replied that his were new games, having nothing to do with the accepted rules. When he was told in photography that there were certain things that could not be done- he did them.

The following of worn paths, save they could be used whereby to find fresh ones, is not for the pioneering spirit. Thus it was that in his student days, too, it was such pioneers as Zola and Tolstoi, with their great social vision, who moved him, even as Mark Twain's devastating satires on decadence never failed to delight him. So it was that work of men like Steichen, Eugene, White and Strand in photography, and Cézanne, Picasso, Marin, O'Keefe in paining, gained his immediate interest and support. For, besides the actual aesthetic contribution in their work, they were at the same time developing the medium in which they happened to be working. They, too, dared and did, and like any scientist or other creative being, unveiled as yet undiscov-

[[image]]
[[caption]] Reproduced from the pages of "Camera Work"
A photograph by Eduard J. Steichen
VITALITY - YVETTE GUILBERT - 1905 [[/caption]]

ered worlds. And the places in which Stieglitz has exhibited works of art: The Photo Secession Galleries, "291," The Intimate Gallery, An American Place, are indeed scientific laboratories....

But Stieglitz will never lift the veil too far. His is a virginal insistence upon leaving the core of any living organism unviolated. A great affirmer of the fact that men need one another and so must protect one another, he cries out against the possessive instinct that violated people as it destroys art. To push back fron- (Cont. on page 26)

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