Charles Henry Caffin

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 Abbott Thayer and George de Forest Brush, who came to epitomize everything Modernism would reject.

Reviewing exhibitions at Stieglitz's gallery, "291," Caffin had the opportunity to assess challenging artists as different as Abraham Walkowitz, Alfred Maurer, John Marin, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley.

Examining a portrait by Thomas Wilmer Dewing at a 1916 exhibition at the Knoedler gallery, Caffin wrote, "It is with curious reflection that one studies its dead harmonies of color, its inert vibrations...and recalls that they once seemed to awaken a response in one's imagination...Poor old fin-de-siècle exquistiveness, how completely everybody but the artist has grown beyond you!

[4] Another writer in the Stieglitz circle, Temple Scott, wrote an "histoire à clef" that offered a particularly unflattering portrait of Caffin, thinly disguised as "Charles Cockayne," a critic of complacent self-assurance.

[5] 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.

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.