Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1912 (Heft 39))

street corner at the noon hour when the audience is the largest, and “ Ich und
Cezanne” is the text of the new gospel. And it has become almost axiomatic
that wherever the voice is loudest in acclaiming the New there the obligation
to the Old is heaviest, and that he who is full of theories is seldom full of any-
thing else.
The complete absence of all such extraneous bids for notoriety is the dis-
tinguishing mark of John Marin and therefore it should surprise no one to find
that his art is the expression of a very personal point of view. It harks back
neither to Egyptian nor Coptic, to Japanese or Fijian, nor is it the distorted
reflection of diligent researches in the hieratic art of a dim past. Radical, in
that it is intensely individual, his art propounds no revolutionary message.
Its only excuse for being is the eternal one of the artist’s joy in his work, in-
spired by the world about him. This he shares as much with the first man
whose soul was thrilled by the spectacle of the dawn as with him who first
made manifest in terms of art something of the poetry and majesty of night.
Man's first inarticulate cry of ecstasy was the birth of poetry, and in the
admiring eye of the primitive lay latent the soul of the artist. This is the link
that binds the past to the present and every man who has accomplished any-
thing in the arts finds herein his true relationship. Marin is no exception to
this rule, and for that very reason his work appears more truly modern than
all the products of the anxious seekers after originality who have forever cut
themselves off* from the living by burrowing in the dust bins of the dead.
Practicing an art as ancient as the pyramids, whose mortuary chambers
were embellished with mural decorations executed in water-color, John Marin
has carried the use of this medium a little farther than any practitioner of
aquarelle that I know of. I say this with a full knowledge of the work of
Ruskin, Turner, Zorn, Sargent, Winslow Homer, and Whistler, to mention
only the most brilliant exponents of water-color painting in modern times.
Of all these Whistler alone is at all comparable to Marin at his best. In certain
of his water-colors, such as the “Chelsea Shops,” “Nocturne—Amsterdam in
Snow” and notably the interior of “Moreby Hall,” Whistler’s method is much
the same as that employed today by Marin, only Marin has carried it to a
point where few will dare to follow. Like Whistler, Marin’s water-colors are
synthetic, suggestive and stimulating to a degree seldem met with in any other
man. They repel or attract according to the imaginative power of the spec-
tator. The literal minded find nothing but absurdity in them, as though the
flights of a man’s soul may not be as reasonable as that of an aeroplane.
These water-colors of Marin’s are eloquent with the ardour of an intense
admiration of the universe. They are the ample, overflowing enthusiasms of
his soul expressed in large, simple gestures that indicate the broad expanses of
green fields, of rolling hills and flower-strewn meadows as bits of gleaming beauty
instead of as botanical or topographical charts, and his mountains have such
bigness and grandeur as are but rarely met with away from their awe-impelling
presence. In these highly synthesized impressions of nature form has been
most knowingly summarized, producing the effect rather than the appearance
of reality. In several instances, such as the “Mountains and Clouds in Tyrol,’
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