Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1910 (Heft 30))

I have said that he was a visionary with his hand upon the pulse of light.
He does not paint you a picture as a print or a colored photograph would paint
it for you, but he extracts those essential qualities in it which belong to it in
the sensations, and placing them together with unerring skill (as words are
placed together unchangeably in a lyric), the structure of his scene grows
naturally out of his hand. Yet, sometimes, I imagine, he feels that his subject
is too big. He does not then profess to compass all the moods of nature,
nor, like Joshua, nor like the second, or the third, or the fifth-rate artist,
bid the sun stand still in the heavens, that he may copy down with patient
skill and minute exactitude day after day each feather and bloom upon
the face of nature. Rather, his colors, like brilliant words, jolt and are
shut sharp. It is as if we heard the hissing of his quickly indrawn breath,
the sharp setting of his teeth, and then, perchance, the tremulous quaver
of a tear—as in those old German Minnelied, or in the sonnets of Shakes-
peare, where passion, having risen to its full throb can go no farther,
and breaks into a smile or sigh, a ripple of suppressed emotion, a rhymed
couplet, Ohei! and Tandaradei! Perhaps it was this aspect of his painting
which suggested to someone—a “painter” himself, I believe—to call it “child-
ish.” Well, it may be, I cannot say; it is too difficult and unprofitable for me to
judge of the natural years in which wisdom may occur or still remain absent.
But at least it is sure that, when in this mood, perhaps, Mr. Marin finishes up a
picture with half a dozen grave splashes of blue in the midst of otherwise color-
less dank clouds, it is not done for nothing; it does not spoil the picture—it
serves to balance it in the right place, and so helps to express the mood of all
the rest. “L’art, mes amis, c’est d’etre absolument soi-meme,”—which only
means that you must first have something to say, and thereafter know how to
say it.
Mr. Marin suggests one other artistic relationship. It is with one of the great-
est and the most fascinating of the lesser genius of the nineteenth century. I mean
Jongkind. In the goodly company of such men it would be easy to predict for
him, a young man, what I am sure would not interest him: a distinguished
career, or what must interest us, perpetual fellowship with the most distinguished
of his craft. To create lovely things one must see lovely things, hope lovely
things, and desire lovely things, and that is what John Marin, in his intense
and simple fashion, is greatly doing.
Wm. D. MacColl.

For the sake of record we reprint some of the criticisms that appeared in
the daily press upon this exhibition:
B. P. Stephenson in the “Evening Post”:
“ John Marin is exhibiting some forty water-colors, a few pastels and etchings, at the Photo-
Secession Galleries, No. 291 Fifth avenue. We have seen strange things in these galleries—the
least strange are Mr. Marin’s works, although we acknowledge there are many subjects the artist
imagines and we cannot comprehend. Still, when we came out of the galleries the other day we
felt a good deal like Balam, the prophet—not that we had been sent there to curse, nor that we came

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