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

I might illustrate the effect of this organic orderliness by the analogy of a person studying
a foreign language, when he no longer consciously translates the words and idioms from one
tongue to the other, but thinks freely in the new one. Marin is no longer translating the
concrete into the abstract, he has learned to think in the latter. And his freedom reacts upon
oneself. In the case of most of these watercolors, one’s own mind is not occupied with the
process of reconstructing some concrete apprehension at the back of the abstract expression.
One accepts what is seen without any need of conjecture. One can enjoy freely the spiritual
appeal of the expression.
For this later work, liberated from much that was confused and more or less merely
impressionistically suggestive, has now attained that capacity to excite intellectual and spiritual
emotions, free of material alloy, such as a symphony may evoke, or, in rare moments, one may
have experienced in the presence of nature, when the perception of things seen has been ab-
sorbed into the joy of pure sensation and one has been caught up into the exaltation of a height-
ened spiritual consciousness.
Manuel Komroff in the “N. Y. Call”:
The difference between watercolors and tinted drawings is well brought out by the ex-
hibition of John Marin’s work at 291 Fifth Avenue. John Marin’s work is watercolor painting
in its highest degree and nothing like the tinted or wash drawings often used and palmed off
as watercolors. The work is better than his exhibition last year and more coherent than his
work of two years ago. The big idea is told quickly lest it become lost in that arabesque of
thought which time brands. A stroke here and a dash there is quite sufficient for us symbolists
and is surely more real than our realists.
The exhibition is the most successful that the little gallery of the Photo-Secessions has held
this year—not that success which is measured by dignified gold frames, but rather a success that
is unmeasurable by anything else than joyous sensation; and this is John Marin’s watercolors.
Forbes Watson in the “N. Y. Evening Post”:
John Marin appears again at the Photo-Secession Gallery, 291 Fifth Avenue, where a
considerable number of his watercolors, oils, drawings, and etchings have been arranged. He
seems to find watercolor his most sympathetic medium. Indeed, he has always shown a quite
exceptional aptitude for this particular vehicle of expression. The clear wash is swiftly, vividly
used to fix upon paper evanescent aspects of light, of weather, of movement.
On entering the exhibition it is necessary to leave reason behind and surrender to sensa-
tion, for logic receives but peremptory treatment at the hands of this artist. That Mr. Marin
is not invariably able to surrender himself to the impression pure and simple, is shown by the
evidences, in some of the pictures, of confused and undigested ideas which struggle to make them-
selves coherent. But if you are one of those who can, even for a moment, give up preconceived
ideas, and receive the record of an artist’s fleeting color impressions you may enjoy the more
spontaneous of Mr. Marin’s watercolors.

Henry McBride in the “N. Y. Sun”:
Positively the youngest cubists in town, the children whose work is to be seen in the
Photo-Secession Gallery, are the best. This will be no surprise to those who have studied
children’s drawings, for, as everybody knows, we are born cubists and it is only after years of
arduous and expensive study that we learn how not to be cubists.
The present exhibition consists of drawings by young pupils of Dr. Joseph Cohen and Miss
Eda L. Puckhaber, who explain in a little foreword that “these drawings were made after school
hours and when their time was their own by children of one of the city’s public elementary
schools. The drawings are not spontaneous productions. They have been influenced by the
suggestions of teacher and fellow pupils, but of that active direction which is commonly advo-
cated in children’s textbooks, in teachers’ manuals and in school curricula, syllabuses and
courses of study there has been none. The goal to which prevailing art instruction aspires is
the attainment of a collective mediocrity.
“The mechanism of instruction has been so perfected that it operates, no matter who the
teacher is, or wffio the learner. It has been rendered fool-proof on the one hand and genius-proof
on the other. And to us the purpose of this process appears at once ambitious and not alto-
gether worthy.”

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