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

“It is this ‘moving of me’ that I try to express, so that I may recall the spell I have been
under and behold the expression of the different emotions that have been called into being.
How am I to express what I feel so that its expression will bring me back under the spell?
Shall I copy facts photographically?
“I see great forces at work; great movements; the large buildings and the small buildings;
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, downward, upward, 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.”
It is simply a new version, personal to the artist, of the familiar truth that art’s business
is not necessarily to present facts. And while Marin’s productions are often disconcerting to
one accustomed to looking at pictures of things instead of pictures of emotions, stated in terms
more or less depending upon the objects that brought about the original emotions—while this
way of looking at the material world is a little puzzling it may freely be said that it often com-
municates eloquently a set of ideas that move and stimulate the observer.
So far as it does this it is successful. It is an approach in a way to the sister art of music,
in which definite meanings may not be attached to the materials out of which one builds his
composition. Marin has come near, in the final drawing of his Woolworth Building series, to
depending upon pure pattern for the expression of his thought; the billowy curves and the
balloon forms that make up this design bear little resemblance to anything that could be taken
for a building. Like Picasso in his noted or notorious patterns, arabesques, call them what
you will, he has traveled far from the world of conventional actuality.
In the entrance to the little show, which has already attracted many interested visitors,
you may see a drawing made some time ago in which the facade of a group of beautiful buildings
is rendered with graceful truthfulness and a delicacy of touch. This is just to let you know, it
seems, that Marin did not come to his present stage by any short cuts. He knows how to draw,
in the academic way, like many another of these experimenters whose sincere efforts have been
made accessible at the Photo-Secession gallery. He has progressed deliberately to his present
stage. It must be taken seriously on this account.
Moreover, Mr. Marin knows uncommonly well how to use his chosen medium of water-
color. He is no novice at this and it is a pleasure quite unusual to find so keen a sense for the
beauty of white paper, washed lightly, but always with purpose and decision, with the trans-
lucent medium of watercolor. The little show is worth seeing, perhaps more than once. And
there are mountain subjects, landscapes, besides the studies of New York. Color, mass and
profile are expressive. If they do not convert you the first time, go again.
W. B. McCormick in the “N. Y. Press”:
New York has withstood many stiff wallops from moralists, critics and uplifters generally,
but most of them were “love-taps” compared with the rough treatment handed out by John
Marin in his “New York Series” of pictures, now on view in the Photo-Secession Gallery.
What Marin does with his little brushes and water-colors is to make lower New York and
its principal commercial tower buildings look as though some inebriated giant had gone swinging
down Broadway putting buildings out of plumb and mixing things up generally.
Marin has written a leaflet for the catalogue of these weird compositions, because he says
they “may need explanation,” which they surely do. Furthermore he thinks the buildings of
the city are alive, and that they move him. It is this “moving of me,” he writes, that he tries
to express. “I see great forces at work, the warring of the great and the small,” he says.

24