Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1916 (Heft 48))

prehension of the orchestra! You would not, for instance, take such a lady and make her director
of the orchestra, would you? Then why put men in charge of our museums who cannot respond
to Marins? It makes one feel quite ashamed to think there are no Marins in the museums.
By and by, of course, they will be in the museums, just as the Whistlers are now, but for
a long, long time the museums would not touch Whistler. It is understood, of course, that we
are referring to museums in general, to those of Germany, England and Ireland as well as our
own. The museums, in fact, would not touch Whistlers until after they had become expensive.
Isn’t that really curious? France was the exception. France bought Whistler’s portrait of
his mother for much less than she would have to pay now. France always spends her public
art money better than the other nations, but that was an especially effective purchase, for it
made Whistler.
Whether a museum could now make Marin by purchasing him is a question. The matter
of ultimate success is so delicate. The weight of a hair sometimes starts the scales that finally
register justice. If Whistler had kept perfectly quiet in his lifetime, had never quarreled and
had never written stinging letters he must have arrived, we all think, at his present fame, by
this time, upon pure merit as a painter. But it is not sure.
In a certain country that won’t be named the phrase “making good” is frequently heard.
The prevalent opinion of the people of that country is that a genius who does not “make good”
is not a genius. It is, however, an opinion that “The Sun’s” chronicler has not been able to
adopt. Full many a gem the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear, “The Sun” believes, and if
it were not so mean to keep pressing the point, it would mention one or two undoubted geniuses
long since mouldered to dust that the unmentioned country gave birth to and has not yet honored.
A fine, spectacular death, however, is undoubtedly an aid. Chatterton’s sudden and
painful taking off put an extravagant valuation upon his verses that has not even yet entirely
worn from them. It is not a method to be conscientiously recommended though to painters.
There are in fact many serious thinkers who hold that complete and universal fame is no longer
desirable for an artist during his lifetime. They say that the world has grown too large, that
the modern machinery of publicity puts too strong a light upon his every action, and that the
crowd, even though they be admirers, rob him of his creative moments and his still more precious
hours of solitude. Rodin is the instance most often referred to.
Whistler’s name has been mentioned in connection with Marin’s chiefly because it would
seem that museum directors must have been prepared by Whistler for Marin. Marin has not
so wide a range as Whistler, but in many departments of the game he is more elusive and subtle.
Marin may or may not approach the standard of Whistler’s big figure pieces. It is too soon to
say. But in the present Marin exhibition there are a dozen watercolors which, if they bore the
butterfly signature, would be rated, even by museum directors, as ranking near the top of
Whistler’s achievement. Pray, don’t imagine for a moment that Marin is a Whistler copyist,
however. Had he been he would have been adopted by the philistines instantly. No; he is a
living, live original. That’s the rub.
He paints invariably in rare colors. There is the stir of air upon the waters and among the
trees of Marin’s pictures and a sense of arrangement that is quite Japanese. The trouble is
that he sometimes attempts the impossible. For that the students love him. All genuine art
lovers love a sport. Marin has never been accused of not being a sport. His Teachings out for
impossibilities result in certain works that appear to be mere confusions to the museum directors.
My advice to the museum directors would be to leave these experiments at one side for the
present.
The experiments, you must not forget, have been made by an intelligent artist, and have
that interest. Later experiments by Marin and future artists may go further along the same
lines, and then these present “confusions” may appear sweet and reasonable.
Peyton Boswell in the “N. Y. Herald”:
John Marin, one of the first of American extremists, is showing forty-seven of his works
in the Photo-Secession Gallery, No. 291 Fifth Avenue. Some of them are disjointed dabs of
pure color on white ground, designed to be suggestions of landscapes, and some are views of
skyscrapers, their sides bent in impossible directions and their skies apparently full of the
suspended debris of dynamite explosions.
The exhibition makes good food for the new art cult, but only the initiated and the faithful
can get anything out of it except a bored feeling. This style of art is now about the most com-
mon thing in the world. Its novelty is gone.

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