Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1913 (Heft 42-43))

the warring of the great and the small; influences of one mass on another greater or smaller
mass. Feelings are aroused which give me the desire to express the reaction of these ‘pull
forces/ those influences which play with one another; great masses pulling smaller masses,
each subject in some degree to the other’s power. In life all things come under the magnetic
influence of other things; the bigger assert themselves strongly, the smaller not so much, but
still they assert themselves, and though hidden they strive to be seen and in so doing change
their bent and direction. While these powers are at work pushing, pulling, sideways, down-
wards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife and there is great music being played.
And so I try to express graphically what a great city is doing. Within the frames there must
be a balance, a controlling of these warring, pushing, pulling forces. This is what I am trying
to realize. But we are all human.”
J. Edgar Chamberlin in the “N. Y. Mail”:
John Marin’s water-colors are no doubt “post-impressionist,” and if we were inclined to
treat his studies of the Woolworth building as an attempted record of fact, they would cer-
tainly appear insane. But it is absolutely undeniable that this artist has a delicate sense of
beauty and a wonderful imagination.
And the Woolworth building studies are not intended as records of fact. Did you ever
brood over this great hastening metropolis, with all its peoples blown every day on a hurricane
of money-making impulse, until it seemed to you that the whole city, skyscrapers and all, had
joined in a mad dance of eager life? Perhaps not. But it is possible to imagine it and remain sane.
Mr. Marin has done this in these sketches. He shows us, first, the Woolworth building
in all its solid glory, but treated with fancy and tinted with lovely lights. Then, in another
sketch, the great building seems to begin to join the dance in which all New York is swinging
away. There is another and another sketch, each further on, until at last the great building
whirls up aloft in a cyclone of color.
A strange fancy, but at any rate most cleverly expressed in these pictures, whether it is
crazy or not.
Nothing could better illustrate the spirit of mere ascent in our architecture, translated
into plastic terms, than Marin’s pictures of the new Municipal building.
His country landscapes are not so fantastically treated. His trick with them is also
esoteric. He summarizes and combines, but often his color is ravishing—as in two or three of
the Adirondack and Berkshire studies.
Marin impresses one as a real dreamer and not at all as a poseur.
Samuel Swift in the “N. Y. Sun”:
At the Photo-Secession gallery you may look at quite another sort of representation of
buildings; the painter, John Marin, has made bold to picture them as though they were ani-
mated by living spirit. Now Marin was for years an architectural draughtsman in a well known
office, that of the Messrs. Tubby, in this city, before he tore himself loose from the exactitudes
that he could not alter and became a free lance, a painter adrift on the tide of his own soul.
And so it is rather interesting to note that buildings for him may have living personalities,
may show waywardness, repulsions, curious attractions, simply as masses, as forms.
Here you see, for example, a series of suggestions evoked by Marin’s study of successive
stages of construction of the Woolworth Building. As it grows more and more assertive, in the
mind of the artist it begins to swerve and bend, in his pictures, until at the last, he shows but a
series of swirls, not meant to look like the structure itself, but to hint, in its powerful curves and
its rhythmic masses, at the impression it has made upon Marin’s eager sensibilities.
But the artist himself in a brief explanatory note accompanying the catalogue of his exhi-
bition puts his case frankly: “Shall we,” he says, “consider the life of a great city as confined
simply to the people and animals on its streets and in its buildings? Are the buildings them-
selves dead? We have been told somewhere that a work of art is a thing alive. You cannot
create a work of art unless the things you behold respond to something within you. Therefore
if these buildings move me they too must have life. Thus the whole city is alive; buildings,
people, all are alive; and the more they move me the more I feel them to be alive.

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