Charles Henry Caffin
Charles Henry Caffin (June 4, 1854 – January 14, 1918) was an
Career
Caffin's earliest writings did not suggest that he would ever be sympathetic to the modernist attack on traditional aesthetic values. His many articles and books, which were surveys intended for a general audience, focused on the major names in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European painting and sculpture, and when considering art from the late nineteenth century, praised the work of artists like
Caffin's interest in pictorial photography led to the most important and productive friendship of his life with
Though he was always more comfortable writing about the Old Masters or painters from his youth like
Caffin had his enemies in the modernist camp, who could not forgive him his more conservative tastes.
In the years between the 1913 Armory Show, which he found impressive but dangerously sensationalistic, and his death in 1918, Caffin energetically covered the changing New York art world and urged his readers to give the difficult new painters a chance. He made a case to skeptical viewers for the work of European modernists like Henri Matisse, Constantin Brâncuși, and Francis Picabia. Yet he also shared his own doubts. While he could see the innovative qualities of Paul Cézanne and Georges Braque, he dismissed the "pinhead humor" of Marcel Duchamp[6] and found the Coney Island paintings of Joseph Stella aggressively vulgar.[7] Writing about a 1915 Picasso exhibition, he admitted that all artists must follow "the inevitable call of their own genius" but that Picasso "has reached a point of intentional abstraction which I, for one, cannot follow."[8]
Charles Caffin was neither a reactionary opposed to Modernism nor an unabashed avant-garde supporter. Sharing his enthusiasm and his skepticism, he provided a forum for reasoned debate and applauded the testing of aesthetic boundaries and standards. He understood that he lived in changing times.
Published works
- Handbook of the New Library of Congress, compiled by Herbert Small; with Essays on the Architecture, Sculpture and Painting by Charles Caffin (1897)
- Photography as a Fine Art (1901)
- American Masters of Painting (1902)
- American Masters of Sculpture (1903)
- How to Study Pictures by Means of a Series of Comparisons of Paintings and Painters (1905)
- Story of American Painting (1907)
- A Child's Guide to Pictures (1908)
- The Appreciation of the Drama (1908)
- The Art of Dwight W. Tryon (1909)
- The Story of Dutch Painting (1909)
- The Story of Spanish Painting (1910)
- A Guide to Pictures for Beginners and Students (1910)
- Story of French Painting (1911)
- Francisco Goya Lucientes (1912)
- Art for Life's Sake (1913)
- How to Study the Modern Painters (1914)
- How to Study the Old Masters (1914)
- The A.B.C. Guide to Pictures (1914)
- How to Study Architecture (1917)
References and sources
- References
- ^ Charles Caffin. Art for Life's Sake (New York: Prang Co., 1913), p. 18.
- ^ Sue Davidson Lowe, Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983), p. 122.
- ^ New York American, March 13, 1916, p. 12.
- ^ Willard Huntington Wright, "The Aesthetic Struggle in America," Forum (February 1916), pp. 205 and 209.
- ^ Temple Scott, "Fifth Avenue and the Boulevard Saint-Michel," Forum (December 1910), pp. 665-685.
- ^ New York American, April 10, 1916, p. 7.
- ^ New York American, February 9, 1914, p. 7.
- ^ New York American, March 15, 1915, p. 9.
- Sources
- Brown, Milton. American Painting from the Armory Show to the Depression. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.
- Johnson, Allen (ed). Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1936.
- Loughery, "Charles Caffin and Willard Huntington Wright, Advocates of Modern Art," Arts Magazine (January 1985), pp. 103–109.
- Lowe, Sue Davidson. Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1983.
- This article incorporates text from a publication now in the New International Encyclopedia (1st ed.). New York: Dodd, Mead.)
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