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 ai
If eventually one is led to feel ths
emotions and ideas are besieging
that the literary department of t
better judgment, such a feeling cai
One glance about the little g
frieze, the pictures are a delight
made a virtue of a failing, who hi
have grave mental doubts, but 1
an unequal warfare.
No matter how annoyed th»
of New York wavering to fit the
his wrath, that this is not a per
“the moving of me” and the “p
diced can fail to become conscic
A careful examination will show—t
color balance, contrast, and clima
in a few cases compelled the artk
When he is true to his instinct he speaks poetically, with charm ana 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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