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WINGS December 1934 WINGS PIONEER OF MODERN ART Sheldon Cheney When the tale is finally told, of Modernism on this side of the Atlantic, it will be found that, more than any other individual Alfred Stieglitz opened the channels to experience and acceptance of a genuinely creative "new: art. And his hand extended to creative workers in every field has tie and again made possible their survival, as artists, and their mature creative work. To understand how this uncompromising radical made a home for living insurgent art in New York, when museums and dealers alike were occupied with the sterile conventional works of Victorian Realism and academicism, one must have the measure of the man, his intuitive feel for original creation, his impatience with intellectual indirection and defensive manœuvering. It was because he himself was living directly, mystically, in a realization of the life of his own time, that he was able to recognize the values of Cézanne, Matisse, and Picasso, introducing their paintings here before other Americans had seen any but and eccentric of perverse purpose in their work. Then when a secondary group of appreciators (and dealers) had caught up, and were willingly exploiting the "School of Paris," Stieglitz already was off discovering another field of living creative art: was providing a home for the only widely significant group- development in American paining, for Hartley, Marin, Dove, Weber, Walkowitz. The extraordinary Georgia O'Keeffe - uniquely alive in her own way - was added to the list only a little later. Stieglitz's attitude toward art is the purest I have ever known. He has afforded the opportunity for the supreme adventure of æsthetic appreciation: contact with intensely expressive plastic realizations in surroundings intimate, harmonious and quiet. The gallery itself is a living work of design. There is something ironic, even sad, in the case of those of us committed to writing critically of the Modern arts. A hundred of our kind have run on about the living quality of Cézanne's pictures, and its significance for our era; Stieglitz showed Cézanne's paintings in 1911. A score of us have written of Gordon Craig's service to the world theater; Stieglitz exhibited 10 [[image]] [[caption]] Permission of An American Place A lithograph by Paul Cézanne BATHERS-1899 [[/caption]] Craig's graphic view of a new stage in 1910. We point out that Matisse negates the old literary paintings, and achieves a new fullness of plastic-dynamic color-orchestration; but Stieglitz was holding the first American show of Matisse in 1908. there is talk today of the Expressionist values in children's drawings; Stieglitz has the world's first exhibition of them in 1912- as he did of Negro sculpture in 1914. And from the start, the people for whom he has made a home have been "permanent"-not those who have a vogue and pass. There are two minor myths- fables, rather- that need refuting. Stieglitz does not, as people say, "have a gallery." The galley is the artist's own; Stieglitz created it for them recognizing their need for a center, and their potential invaluable service to man. When they have occupied it, he steps aside. he is not, and never has been, a dealer in art. He utterly lacks the shrewdness and suavity necessary to that rôle. He doesn't know why certain members of the community should "own" pictures anyway. The other legend is that he is 11
