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

out blessing; the ass incident we omit; but we had learned something of the futility of Biblical
cursing. Now, to begin with, the men who gather together in these galleries, and the men whose
works are exhibited on its walls, do believe in themselves—and that is an important item—but they
do not believe that they have reached—some of them do not believe they ever will reach—the point
for which they are striving. They are all at sea, and they acknowledge it, each man on a different
tack trying to reach a point whose whereabouts and whose direction he does not even know. And
each man appears to believe that every other man is on the wrong tack. There can be no commer-
cialism in such galleries. A Photo-Secession mouse would not have a much better fate than one
in a church. Alfred Stieglitz, we know, pays for the galleries out of the hope of leading us to what
he believes to be the art of the future, but he acknowledges he does not know where that art will
reach.
“ ‘We are in somewhat of the same condition as they were in the early days of the Renaissance,
he will tell you, seeking for the unknown. I don’t know when it will be reached, but I do see that
these men are alive and vital, and my object is to show to Americans who have not the opportunity
of going abroad, what vitality in art exists there.’ But to go back to Marin’s pictures. There are
some of his paintings, which, as you enter the gallery, strike you as living; for instance, the ‘Move-
ment/ ‘Pont de 1’Alma.’ But do those deep blue spots on the clouds help the ‘Movement ?’ ‘No;
but I had to put them there,’ says the artist; ‘they were not there, but to express my feeling they
had to be there.’ Mr. Marin again expresses his feelings, or, rather, attempts to, in a village that
has been almost drowned into yellows and blues by a downpour of rain. It was rather discon-
certing, at the commencement of your education, to hear a woman who knew all about art, announce
that Mr. Marin had ‘succeeded in getting that proportion of color after which the Orientals seek.’
And that she felt when she looked at the picture that she was about to tread on an Eastern carpet,
while he was telling you that he had failed in his object, that what he wanted to translate was the
brightness of the colors on the houses after the rainstorm and the still threatening aspect of the
clouds. We do not pretend to have yet understood Mr. Marin’s work; we can see beauty in Notre
Dame,’ but anybody could make that dear old lady beautiful; in the ‘Three Towers of Rouen,’ in
the ‘Pierrefonds,’ in a delightful pastel of St. Mark of Venice, but we cannot discover the truth of
the ‘Suspended Sun.’ The fact of the matter seems to be that those men, and they appear to be
modest about it, have not yet learned to tell what they feel. If they really have anything great
to tell, they may be hampered by persons who are flattering them with the tale that they have al-
ready told all that is, and even the most modest yield to flattery, especially men. The writer, once
an unbeliever, does hope to live to see something come out of this vital movement. At the same
time he trusts that some of the men in this disorganized crowd will not carry their ideas to such an
extravagant extent that they will drive out the doubting souls.”
Elizabeth Luther Cary in the “New York Times”:
“At the Photo-Secession Galleries are some water-colors, pastels and etchings by Marin,
many of them exquisite in color, but too much influenced by the theories of Matisse to please a
public or critics not yet advanced to that stage of ‘up-to-dateness.’ Marin’s delicate sense of form
keeps him from throwing his composition to the four winds of heaven, and his no less delicate sense
of color inspires him to charming harmonies which, however, are no more charming than those
which he produced when he valued more highly than now the gentle art of representation.
“In one of his Venetian pastels he seems to us to have achieved a conspicuous success, and we
ascribe it to the underlying tone of the brown paper holding together the scattered notes of color
as white paper never does. It is not impossible to use white as what might be called a binding
tone for a variety of colors, but it is so difficult that a wise painter commonly saves himself that
trouble and secures a no less delightful result.
“It is not, however, to be denied that the purity of these fluid greens and blues and the brilli-
ancy of these patches of cold white occasionally, if not always, combine in a decorative effect of
great loveliness. If we were content to have our pictures made of abstract shapes of color as our
Eastern carpets are made we should be very well satisfied indeed to have in a faintly tinted room
some of these fresh, sweet harmonies. One or two of them look as though they had been stained
with the very dyes of the Spring grass and the rain-washed heavens. The painter’s instinct for
recognizing the possibilities of structure by color alone is extraordinary, and we find his color more

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