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

he even gives one vivid, if etherealized, realism. In almost every watercolor save those that
look like Chinese hieroglyphics I get decided realism. It is realism to something rare, subtle,
fleeting, dreamlike in the actual scene, and facts and measures have little to do with it. Even
the Chinese hieroglyphics I “understand” sufficiently for myself. They are pleasing forms from
nature juggled together in agreeable color and have the effect of the stamps one sees upon the
back of a fine porcelain.
The Chinese feeling they suggest is continued in practically all the landscapes, although it
appears simply in the increased mellowness and subtlety of the color. Many correspond in the
harmonious use of grays to old Chinese temple paintings, but there is no sign that the artist
himself was striving for such an effect. It is merely a coincidence. Chinese art gives one the
sense of age, of vast knowledge, of the accumulation of thousands of years of resignation to the
difficult facts of life, and to thankfulness, just the same, for the good moments here and there.
Mr. Marin’s art seems old, too, this year; much older than ever before. The fact is the
whole world is feeling its age at present, and it is no surprise to find one of our most sensitive
artists swayed by it.
Charles H. Caffin in the “N. Y. American”:
An exhibition of watercolors, oils, drawings and etchings by John Marin is being held in
the gallery of the Photo-Secession, No. 291 Fifth Avenue.
When I first met him in Paris some years ago, he showed me a number of etchings. They
did not so much express his own way of seeing as suggest that he had been seeing through
Whistler's eyes. Later he returned to New York and became identified with the spirit of
“291,” of which his subsequent development has been very intimately a product. For here he
found encouragement to seek the source of his inspiration in himself and to experiment with his
own way of seeing and feeling. To his maturer experience New York presented an amazement
of impressions.
They were amazing because so vast and incoherent. For, as I divine his art, the things of
sight appeal to Marin as manifestations of force. He sees in the forms and color of nature
the symbols of its inward workings; in the handiwork of man in cities, the symbols of intellectual,
material and spiritual energy. And in New York he found, as do most other thinking souls,
that these forms of energy are confused and incoherently related. To the optical eye the city
may seem solid and stable; but to the eye of the spirit, visioning, the elements and qualities of
energy that created and inform it, it may seem a very vortex of conflicting forces.
He tried to symbol forth these visions of invisible reality, swirling, thrusting, soaring,
tottering around him. But it was not until he had spent a summer in the Tyrol, communing
with the colossal, but comparatively stable, phenomena of mountains, forests and valleys that
he began to find himself and learn how to control the magnitude of his impressions.
Control in art, as in any other department of human activity, is the result of organization;
the adjustment of conflicting values and the establishment of harmonious relations. In Marin’s
case this was not the balancing of big masses; mountain against sky, forest with valley. His
temperament refuses to see nature thus adjusting herself into large conventional distinctions, as
the world has systematized society into classes. It refuses to see the mass as mass, but views
it as an aggregate of infinite individual units, correlated into a whole of living organic unity.
To organize this unity of impression among the innumerable strokes and touches by which he tries
to interpret his vision, and in a medium that permits so little fussing with effects as watercolor,
was his problem. It was in the Tyrol, I repeat, that he began to gain control over it.
When again he returned to New York and applied himself to the phenomena of the city,
his work at once revealed superior organization. He probably made as many failures as
successes, for the kind of expression he is intent upon, so elusive, as easily twisted awry by a
little discord of color, or a touch of tone too big or too little, as the mechanism of a watch is
upset by a grain or two of dust, can only be attained through failures. Indeed, it is only
through failure that anything worth while can be accomplished in the spiritual world, and
Marin’s expression is as truly a product of the spiritual imagination as poetry. If you seek to
align it with material comparison, you may as well leave it alone. Unless you can feel it as the
symbol of spirit speaking with spirit, it is not for you.
Then, after grappling with the forces of our leviathan city, he spent last summer by the sea-
shore in Maine. His reaction to nature was now more comprehensible to himself. The paint-
ings that he has gleaned from this quiet spell of nature-study show remarkable development.
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