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

The Berkshire and Adirondack landscapes reveal the same unbiased eye for the beauty and
grandeur of nature as did his series of the Alps. They have a pellucid clarity and brilliancy
of color that is quite rejuvenating to a weary gallery trotter, and in these, no less than in the
New York series, he has successfully evoked the spirit of the place. One needs no catalogue to
know that No. 23 is the Adirondacks, any more than one needs to be told that the rolling,
dipping hills and hollows of No. 18 is the heart of the Berkshires. The solitary grandeur, the
cool, keen air, and frost-bitten color is of the essence of the first, as much as the soft, friendly
undulations and warm color is typical of the latter and one is as consummately suggested as
the other. Taken as a whole, this collection of water-colors confirms and strengthens my
feeling that in John Marin America possesses one of her greatest artists, whose work will take
a place with the best produced in modern times.
Charles H. Caffin in the “N. Y. American
Shortly we are to have an exhibition in New York which will demonstrate the independence
and liberty of spirit that have characterized the art of painting during the last seventy-five
years. Its sweep will include the work of such a recognized master as Ingres or Daumier, and
that also of some of the later men, whose position has not yet secured popular approval. To
all but a few the latter are still an enigma or anathema.
It will be an exhibition almost exclusively—certainly in its main interest—foreign. So it
is pleasant in anticipation of this foreign invasion, to note an exhibition fully as independent,
quite as conclusively one of artistic liberty, which, moreover, is thoroughly American. I allude
to the exhibition of water-colors by John Marin at the Little Gallery of the Photo-Secession,
No. 291 Fifth Avenue.
Marin is a New Yorker, who, when I first met him, was living in Paris. He was doing
etching, which, though excellent, was reminiscent of outside influence. He was also making
water-colors, which in their motive and manner were nobody’s but his own. They showed,
however, that as yet he had not completely found himself.
Then Marin spent a Summer in the Tyrol, pitting his imagination and his technical re-
sources against the problems of big nature. It was not views that he was studying, but sensa-
tions. He sought to render his impressions of the vastness and the power which are embodied
in these great elemental facts of nature.
He faced those Alps and they faced him. Then he grappled with them; but, though he got
a strangle hold, he could not quite pin his antagonist to the ground. His pictures were ex-
pressive of the vastness of the scene and abounded with beautiful passages of color, delicate
and resonant tonalities, but the relations between the colors were not fully achieved; there were
jars and distractions, interfering with the wholeness of the harmony; in a word, the com-
positions were not completely organized.
Marin, however, had had the advantage of measuring himself with his antagonist, and
returned home to renew the encounter in the face of our own Berkshires and the Adirondacks.
Meanwhile, he was face to face with magnitude of another kind, not of nature’s, but of man’s
making—New York and her mountains and valleys of masonry and torrents and streams of
human energy.
Impressions clamorously assailed him, but he was in no hurry to record them. He watched
and thought; studied, reflected and digested. Hitherto sensations had mastered him; he was
determined now that he would master them. So passed two years of silent, steady application,
of which this exhibition now shows some of the results.
It will baffle and possibly enrage a great many people. It will, as the French say, “em-
beter le bourgeois”—stupefy and torment the average public. For what the latter are looking
for in any form of art is what they have learned to recognize as familiar. Now the form in
which Marin embodies his impressions is not a familiar one, because he is trying to express his
sensations and not to record the facts of sight. Hence, his sensations being individual to
himself, he has invented his own form.
It is built up of a great number of bricks of color value, which at first sight may seem to
have been thrown together haphazard, but which will be found to be orderly and compactly
cemented together by tone-relations of extreme subtlety. They seem to be the result, not

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