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

J. Edgar Chamberlin in the “N. Y. Evening Mail”:
John Marin, whose oils, watercolors, etchings and drawings are on exhibition at the
Photo-Secession Gallery, is a wonderful colorist and the possessor of a style of great originality
and expressiveness, whose fault is a too great contempt of the understanding of people in general.
We have gone so far as to approve of his remarkable pictures of the Woolworth building,
in which that lofty structure begins to oscillate and then go off into spirals in the air, because
these things are a sort of interior or psychologic picturing of the effect of the architectural mad-
ness of downtown New York on a sensitive soul. But in this exhibition at the Photo-Secession
there are several combinations of lines and colors which it is impossible to “get” at all. They
may represent a sort of artistic trial-lining in the artist’s own mind. But if so, why exhibit
them? The artist may answer simply, Well, why not exhibit them? In which case we can
only make this rejoinder: The burden of the proof that they ought to be exhibited is upon you,
since you invite us to come and see them. By asking us in to see them you assume that you
have something which will mean something to us. If we had seen them hanging upon your
studio walls, we should say, “These are the tools of his trade; they are paper, or graphite, or
colored pigment, or what not; but seen at the Photo-Secesh, in a public exhibition, they are
supposed to mean something that we can understand. But they don’t. Therefore, why
exhibit them?”
Just the same, there is real delight for the eye, of a pleasant sort, not obtainable anywhere
else, a summary, simple, joyous thing like the “Pine Trees, Casco Bay,” “Looking Through
the Trees,” “William Street” (etching), two studies in oil (12 to 15 of the catalogue) and sev-
eral others. And everywhere we get the strangeness and perfect individuality in color, always
seeming to be a new and delightful revelation in color, which is characteristic of Mr. Marin.

Chas. H. Caffin in the “N. Y. American”:
Some of John Marin’s most recent work in watercolors is being shown at the gallery of
the Photo-Secession, No. 291 Fifth Avenue, between Thirtieth and Thirty-first Streets.
This artist and this gallery are very intimately associated. It was here that Marin some
five years ago found his mind directed toward more abstract forms of expression. Hitherto, in
the years succeeding his actual student days in Paris, he had been seeing and feeling through the
influence of Whistler. Then the exhibitions at “291” of Cezanne and Picasso’s watercolors
and the talks in the gallery that they stimulated opened up to him the suggestion of abstraction
as a motive. He spent a Summer in the Tyrol, seeking to discover the principles of abstract
expression in the study of mountain scenery. Then he returned to New York and for a while
tested his experience and enlarged it by studying the colossal aspects of the city’s skyscrapers.
He was represented by some of these watercolors in the exhibition in the armory in 1913. For
the past two years he has been painting on the coast of Maine.
The most characteristic feature of Marin’s evolution in this new direction has been his
independence. Having sensed the idea that the most valuable element in painting is expression
and that expression may be made more expressive by disembodying it, as far as possible, from
the direct representation of the concrete, he proceeded to fit the idea to his own temperament
and to work it out in a manner personal to himself. The result is that his watercolors have
shown not only a distinct individuality but also an unbroken progression in capacity, leading
on step by step to the very remarkable advancement of this latest work.
The latter suggests that Marin has made a great advance in intellectural grasp. Much
that hitherto had been only felt has been made plain to his understanding; that which he had
instinctively groped after he has now captured and submitted to mental analysis. In the
first place, he has gained in assurance of selection as to what he shall leave out and what shall
be put in. He has learned to discriminate the ultimate essentials of the concrete that must be
retained as a foundation of actuality to support his fabric of abstract expression. Secondly,
he has attained to a more thorough organization. He has learned how to give his abstraction
actual organic constructiveness. In the best examples of his recent work one can feel that the
washes of color, notwithstanding their impalpable suggestion, are actually built together into a
structural whole. The various planes and surfaces of the transparent edifice are locked together
with the logic of the builder who makes provision for the stresses and strains of his assembled
material. And in this superior coordination the colors have become more fine both in their
individual quality and in their mutual relations.

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