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

naturally from the obviously beautiful to the one beside it. Mr. Stieglitz is very foxy. He knows
how to show pictures.
“ 'Moving Spots’ is a clever bit of painting. Strong dabs of color in the clouds, accentuated
patches of sky, have no apparent reason for being there. Eliminate them and the picture is common-
place; with them, the clouds move. Is it a trick ? All painting is artificial. To obtain the illusion
is the artist’s job. Does he accomplish it ? Then he succeeds. Better an illogical dab of ultra-
marine and scudding clouds that scud than illogical dabs and clouds that hang like lead and refuse
to budge.
“We confess that we cannot follow Marin in all his uses of color. We have not lived with
his pictures long enough. He has new combinations. We have heard new phrases in music and
literature, to which we had to become accustomed. At the moment we doubt that we ever will
enjoy some of them and it will occasion great surprise if we ever see in them the great beauty that
belongs to his simpler, well-seen pictures in which he has used white with such rare artistic sense.
It is an exhibition that should not be passed by; by far the best of the season in this gallery.”
J. Edgar Chamberlain in the “ Evening Mail”:
“John Marin is one of the young American-Parisians who, like Joan of Arc, have heard
voices telling them to crusade against the powers that prevail in the world. He makes remarkable
water-colors and pastels, full of joyousness of color, and reveals much skill in drawing. But many
of them are incomprehensible to ordinary people.
“And yet Mr. Marin’s water-colors and pastels exhibited this week and next at the Photo-Se-
cession are by no means all incomprehensible. His 'Pierrefonds Castle,’ and several drawings of
a great bridge on the Seine are quite easy to understand, and are excellent and solid in drawing.
Many of his drawings are nothing more than swirls of color; but the color is delightful in its quality,
and often wonderfully true to those fleeting and ineffable sky tints which are the despair of painters.
“The interpretation of these intense moods of nature is a legitimate ambition for any artist,
and Mr. Marin is to be felicitated on the zeal with which he adheres to his ideal.
“He shows also remarkable etchings, freely and broadly executed.”
Mr. Harrington in the “New York Herald”:
“Mr. John Marin, of Paris and New York, at the Photo-Secession, has asked the public to
help him understand what he thinks he is trying to do. He does not seem to know the exact trend
of his endeavors in the water-colors, pastels and etchings which he has assembled. From the
neutral grayish yellow walls of the gallery, strange, wild things in lavender, blues and yellows and
greens seem to leap out and seize the visitor. Mr. Alfred Stieglitz, who may be there to explain
Mr. Marin, says the exhibition is great. The exhibition, outlandish as it seems, gives the idea
that the artist is conscientiously trying to get somewhere, either going or coming. There are forty-
three water-colors, twenty pastels and some ten etchings in the display.”

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