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

vention, in spite of the amazing suggestiveness of one or two of the sketches. Mr. Marin does
not present the world objectively, but rather expresses his own emotions in beautiful color notes,
almost as abstractedly as if music were his medium. One must divest the mind of all ideas of
“correct” drawing and perspective, one must forget the work he has been brought up on,
and consider these light, delicate color patterns as efforts to synthesize an emotion before the
emotion has flown, without the slightest desire on the part of the artist to act as a recorder of
facts. Then it will be hard indeed to fail in responding to these fine, though imperfect ex-
pressions of a sensitive, poetic artist. A delicate and lovely essence of beauty has been caught
like a butterfly and fastened to the paper.
J. N. Laurvik in the “Boston Transcript”:
In his new collection of water-colors now on exhibition at the Photo-Secession, John Marin
is more stenographic and suggestive than ever, and to the casual gallery frequenter I am afraid
he will be even more enigmatic than before. In anticipation of possible misunderstanding the
artist has prepared a statement of his intentions which, by reason of its clarity, is as inter-
esting as the pictures it serves to explain:
“Shall we 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 themselves dead? We have been told some-
where 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.
“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, downwards, upwards, I can
hear the sound of their strife and there is great music being played.
“And 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.”
Seldom has an artist given a more lucid explanation of his intentions than this and only rarely
has the intention been realized in the work as completely as in these water-colors of John Marin.
The chaotic hurly-burly of New York is here given a pictorial rendering that must surely corre-
spond to the sensations of at least many strangers within its gates who are overpowered by its im-
mensity. These pictures make little or no pretence at a concrete representation of actuality.
They make the loose impressionism of Pennell appear photographic by comparison. Neverthe-
less they convey a greater sense of architectural mass, of structure and of the general bulk and
volume of New York than the work of any other man who has as yet assayed this difficult task.
Despite their apparent grotesqueness, or rather, I should say, by reason thereof, one gains
a powerful impression of this city of amazingly tall towers, of gigantic structures towering
above puny ones and of the rush and go that constitutes the tumultuous pulsebeat of New
York. Here the towering top of the new Woolworth Building scraping the clouds makes the
low-lying Post Office Building look squat, like a frog clinging to the edge of City Hall Park.
And No. 3, giving another impression of the same subject, conveys a feeling of dizzy height
that transcends the few inches of paper on which it is recorded, going beyond all bounds of the
frame as its lines and color liberate the imagination of the beholder.

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