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

so much of calculation as of a very sensitive instinct for color. The whole, when you have
learned to accept it in the spirit in which it is painted, is unusually beautiful; moreover, even
to the eye very suggestive of the aspects of the scene.
But it is to the imagination that these products of Marin's imagination are meant primarily
to appeal. If you have no imagination or refuse to exercise what you have these pictures are
not for you. The liberty of his imagination is displayed conspicuously in his impressions
of the sensations with which the mammoth architecture and the seething tumult of downtown
New York inspire him. It is the urge of life in all this that moves him. In the might of it
the very buildings seem to throb and swing.
Some six or eight of these New York pictures hang together. Then reinforce one another,
as the rhythms of movement leap from picture to picture, coursing through the series in a
resistless exultation. I have selected one for reproduction, and placed this water-color for
comparison with two other artists' recent etchings.
The one is by Herman A. Webster, a bald and scarcely more than photographic summary
of the facts of sight. The other etching is by Joseph Pennell, whose work, as a rule, is apt to
suggest the hasty impressions of a persistent globe-trotter. But in this case he seems to have
sensed much of, at least, the material immensity of the subject; whereas it is rather the spiritual
aspect that Marin seeks to render.
His picture necessarily loses more in reproduction than the others do, for not only are the
colors lost, but, still more important, the tonal relations also, and with these goes the sense
of vibration and elasticity. Fixity has taken the place of movement, for in the original the
values so echo one another that the lean-to one side of the building is in act of recovering itself.

Hutchins Hapgood in an article Art and Unrest in the “N. Y. Globe”:
We are living at a most interesting moment in the art development of America. It is no
mere accident that we are also living at a most interesting moment in the political, industrial,
and social development of America. What we call our “unrest" is the condition of vital growth,
and this beneficent agitation is as noticeable in art and in the woman's movement as it is in
politics and industry.
Art has suddenly become a matter of important news. The New York “American," for
instance, now devotes an entire page every Monday to art news and art discussion. When one
remembers what a great mass of people that newspaper is intended to reach, this fact seems
significant. And the fact that Charles Caffin, one of our most conscientious and thoughtful
critics, is writing that page would seem to indicate a serious as well as a widespread interest.
That is only one of many journalistic indications of the popular interest. The coming great
exhibition at the armory has produced in a large public something like excitement. Moreover,
there is a surprising amount of curiosity and an even stronger feeling about new and strange
tendencies and experiments in art. Post-Impressionism, as it is called, has something of the
same appeal as a bullfight.
Yesterday I went to three art exhibitions in New York, all of which are in line with what
is vaguely called Post-Impressionism. It does not matter what it is called, but the important
thing is that it means agitation. It means education, in the disturbing, doubting sense. Post-
Impressionism is as disturbing in one field as the I. W. W. is in another. It turns up the soil,
shakes the old foundations, and leads to new life, whether the programmes and ideas have
permanent validity or not.
The exhibitions I saw yesterday were those of Jo Davidson, sculpture, at Reinhardt s
of Alfred Maurer, painting, at Folsoms', and of John Marin, painting, at the Photo-Secession,
or “291."
Alfred Maurer’s work seemed to me extremely interesting from the point of view of success
along somewhat new lines. It is singularly authoritative and able. There is certainly the
touch of a master in it. It is amusing to the mind to note that Maurer has taken from the
new tendencies those elements only which he could immediately realize, which he could get
over.” This work, therefore, ought to be popular and instructive.

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