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

we can make out in his landscapes, done in the Berkshires and in the Adirondacks, a true feeling
for the big masses in nature. But in trying to express the forces that he talks about, great
or small, he conveys the impression of a man moving about in worlds not realized. Like the
Italian Futurists who seek to disintegrate things seen into their emotional constituents, he
ends by denoting only an incomprehensible confusion. The present writer tried his best, in
studying the Futurist exhibition in Paris last winter, to reduce this or that frantic network
of form and color to some sort of coherence, but came to the conclusion that it would be a little
easier to carry water in a sieve. Mr. Marin’s pictures are, frankly, as disconcerting, though, to
tell the truth, he rarely lets himself go with quite the recklessness characteristic of his European
contemporaries.
When he sets out to portray the Woolworth Building, for example, one can at least make
out the broad elements of that colossal object. But when these towering structures of his
begin to oscillate, or when he causes vessels in the river to perform unprecedented evolutions,
we can but regret the triumph or philosophic theory over what we may call, for the sake of the
argument, artistic matter. The functions of line, of light and shade, of color, of composition,
are turned topsy-turvy, and Mr. Marin covers so many sheets of paper with so many hypotheses
of which we cannot make head or tail. To him, doubtless, they express a purpose. To us
they express nothing but a lamentable error. Some one, Matthew Arnold, we believe, once
said of Gautier that he failed to make the most of his talents because he stopped at a halfway
house and never afterward had the impulse to leave it. It is not even a halfway house at
which Mr. Marin is lingering. Sooner or later he will discover that he has lost himself in
an impasse,
Forbes Watson in the “N. Y. Evening Post”:
At the Photo-Secession Gallery, No. 291 Fifth Avenue, until February 15, another glimpse
may be had of one of the phases of the much discussed “new movement”; but in the presence
of John Marin’s work the “movement” takes second place. This artist has something of his
own to say, and is not merely an agent introducing ideas in which he himself had no initiative.
If eventually one is led to feel that Mr. Marin has not yet found the necessary balance, that
emotions and ideas are besieging him so abundantly that he is unable to sort and relate them,
that the literary department of the new movement has occasionally overcome his instinctive
better judgment, such a feeling cannot smother the delight which so much beauty of color gives.
One glance about the little gallery is a complete reassurance. Considered as a decorative
frieze, the pictures are a delight and joy to the eye. This is not the work of a man who has
made a virtue of a failing, who has joined the procession for fear of being left behind. He may
have grave mental doubts, but he has very certain instincts, against which his doubts lead
an unequal warfare.
No matter how annoyed the conservative may be at finding the strongest steel structures
of New York wavering to fit the ideas of a movement; no matter how certain he may feel, in
his wrath, that this is not a personal point of view; no matter how positive he may be that
“the moving of me” and the “pull forces” are undigested hysterical formulae, only the preju-
diced can fail to become conscious of Mr. Marin’s infallible instinct for color and spotting.
A careful examination will show—to some—that in almost every one of these pictures there is a
color balance, contrast, and climax, in striking opposition to the large but hazy ideas that have
in a few cases compelled the artist to become self-conscious.
When he is true to his instinct he speaks poetically, with charm and grace. When he
enters upon argument, instead of confining his effort to the interpretation of an emotion, he
descends to prose, and at once becomes both less suggestive and less lucid. Yet the formula
of a movement cannot overcome the lightness of his brush nor the refinement of his color sense.
Even when his pictures become so argumentative that their emotional quality is proportion-
ately weakened, something of the same charm of spotting often remains.
The formidable mentality behind all great art is not suggested by these airy, lovely, and ex-
citing sketches, but the qualities of poetry and rhythm place them in the rank of painting of
a high order. In the New York series the spectator is too often made conscious of a con-
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