Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1909 (Heft 27))

THE MAURERS AND MARINS AT THE
PHOTO-SECESSION GALLERY

NO exhibition ever held under the auspices of the Photo-
Secession aroused more interest or discussion amongst the
art-lovers and artists of New York than the recent Maurer
sketches in oil and Marin water-colors exhibited in the Little
Gallery from March thirtieth to April nineteenth. As a matter
of record we reprint the leaflet which appeared with the
Catalogue and which was written by Mr. Charles H. Caffln for the occasion.
For the same reason we reprint some of the press clippings.
ALFRED MAURER
Is Saul also among the prophets ? was the query suggested by Alfred Maurer’s picture in last
year’s Salon. For it represented a life sized figure, supporting a color scheme of geranium red
and two blues of similarly arresting hue. Could this be the work of a man hitherto associated with
low tonalities; which had been duly honored in America, .where the safe thing always counts, with
prizes and medals. Alas, it was true! Poor Maurer had left the sure path and was consorting
with the prophets, the crazy seers—those who see. The quondam pupil of Mr. Chase had had his
eyes opened by Matisse. He had been led to discover other colors in his paint box than blacks and
drabs and white; also to look for color beyond the walls of an artificially darkened studio. He had
been drawn out-of-doors into the sunshine. There, under the indirect persuasion of Matisse, he
has found himself seeing, not only local color, but visions of color, evoked from the actual facts,
by the play of his imagination under the spell of some particular mood. He has ranged himself,
in fact, with the other men in Paris, who, as I have tried to suggest in the case of Marin, are trying
in their pictures to substitute interpretation for representation, and whose interpretation eliminates
as far as possible the assertion of the concrete, seeking an abstract expression through color
harmonies, somewhat as does the musical composer.
In these studies then, for that is what they are—color notes of spiritual impressions received
in the presence of nature, he is not aiming at the representation of the landscape, but at the
projection on the panel of the color harmonies with which for the moment nature has inspired
him. They are primarily to be judged as little creations of color beauty, with the same detachment
from notions of subject matter, that you approach the appreciation of a piece of antique pottery.
You may even observe in some of them—I don’t know how intentionally on Maurer’s part—a
dripping application of the color, and the leaving of portions of the ground apparent between the
masses of color, that recall the antique potter’s method of applying colors and leaving parts of the
biscuit of the vase in reserve. In judging them this way, however, one may be conscious some-
times that an object has been so emphasized as to challenge the mind to a question of what it
represents, without giving sufficient clew to the answer. A doubt is raised. One is puzzled, and
thus the mental operation of conjecture interferes with the free play of the imagination.
But the occasional occurrence of these concrete disturbances to the purely abstract impression
may serve by contrast to bring out more clearly at what this artist and others, working in the
same spirit, are aiming. They would borrow from nature only so much form as may supply a
scaffold on which to hang the decoration of a color fantasy. When once we have accepted this
point of view, we cease to attach separate importance to the scaffold, and only ask, in return that
the artist will not obtrude it on our notice. If he does, it is at his own peril of disturbing our
appreciation of his abstract purpose. The latter, for my own part, seems a natural evolution
from the example of Whistler and marks a new and very suggestive note in modern painting. It
is the more to be respected, that it is in the nature of treasure trove, recovered from a redoubtable
past; for it is, along the line that Whistler blazed, a reinforcement of our own art by infusing into
it some of the principles of the antique art of the Orient.

Charles H. Caffin.