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

justify itself. In the case of two marble heads with highly polished surface, like a head by the
same artist shown last season privately by an uptown dealer, the Greek convention is used with
a sense of humor, but the thing is definitely planned. It is understood.
There is little or no emotional force in the work, but there is logic, humor, knowledge, and
a streak of art.
Elizabeth Luther Carey in the “N. Y. Times”:
At the Photo-Secession Galleries is an exhibition of drawings and sculpture by a young
Polish artist, Eli Nadelman. In a self-respecting and tolerably clear little introduction to his
brief list of titles Mr. Nadelman explains that his effort has been toward attaining the highest
possible degree of plasticity in his sculpture, and says further: “Neither an exact copy of nature
nor a geometrical abstract form, nor all the productions of painting and sculpture in our time
that can be placed between these two extremes, possess that quality —matter has an individual
will which is its life. A stone will refuse all the positions we may wish to give it if these are
unsuited to it. By its own will it will fall back into the position that its shape in conjunction
with its mass demands.”
There is reason to believe that Mr. Nadelman, whose sense of form is highly developed,
will work through the present stage of his accomplishment to a nearer approach to his ideal
than he shows in the present exhibition. He already has cast behind him an outworn shell of
contortion and broken and undulating forms, to arrive at a serenity of surface of the utmost
beauty. A couple of heads in marble invite the touch by the exquisite smoothness of their
generalized surfaces. It is, moreover, a generalization that includes a true synthesis and not
an emptiness.
But the artist is still hampered in his communications with the public by childish symbols.
One should not perhaps forget that a very great critic has found in the Sistine ceiling “the
symbolism of a primitive and the science of a decadent,” but the fact that the words could be
applied with equal truth to much of the “modern” art by no means argues that all our young
artists are on the way to become Michelangelos. An artificial innocence of vision which, in
combination with the science of decadence, produces an effect of deepest guile, is the stumbling
block of the new schools. The fact that Mr. Nadelman has a keen sense of humor is in favor of
his winning out in his fight against abnormal influences.

Henry J. McBride in the “N. Y. Sun”:
The important show of the week is the John Marin exhibition of watercolors in the Photo-
Secession Gallery, at 291 Fifth Avenue. Mr. Marin’s is one of the most undoubted talents in
America, and its slow progress into the consciousness of the great public is a tragedy—for the pub-
lic. It would seem that such exquisite work would win instant applause, would be its own recom-
mendation; but the same old painful period of purgatorial tests, it now begins to be apparent,
will be exacted of it, before it enters into the holy places of the museums and picture auctions.
What is the public’s loss is, I am inclined to think, Mr. Marin’s gain. As an artist he
continually grows, and the present exhibition is one of the best he has ever given. Certainly
the work is more subtle. This unmolested utterance of “melodic” color (the felicity of the work
has a Mozartian strain) could hardly continue were Mr. Marin as great a popular favorite as,
say, Harrison Fisher or Dana Gibson.
He would be owned too much by his admirers, and as the money value would be quickly
and precisely fixed upon his efforts so would the immense weight of the public opinion (something
that can be laughed at when you are safe from it, but which no giant can slay single handed in
actual combat) be entirely borne upon the desire to make this money producer do the much
advertised Mozartian strain over and over again ad infinitum, ad nauseam.
One of the most comforting things about Mr. Marin, the artist, is that though he belongs
unmistakably to this year of Our Lord, he yet escapes from complete identification with any
of the various cliques or schools. Like Albert P. Ryder, he would be gladly claimed by all the
factions. There is frequently in his work a breaking up of outlines and a recomposition of them
in the “modern art” fashion, yet I should hate to call Mr. Marin a cubist, a post-impressionist
or any other term except “artist.”
I am never very enthusiastic about labels or classifications, however, and in the present
instance it contents me that Mr. Marin is a poet, and that in the development of his impression

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