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

In most of these he has ceased to experiment; he has successfully achieved. They carry
on the face of them a certainty of confirmed assurance. Brain has wrought a finer organiza-
tion and feeling discovered fuller utterance. It speaks in greater clarity of color, in mellower
and more subtle harmonies. It is more flexible in expression, more immediately imaginative.
Noticeable, too, is the variety of expression. No formula is discoverable in choice of subject or
treatment. Everything speaks of a liberation of spirit, working in harmony with its surround-
ings and actively alive.
Nor does the charm of these watercolors suggest finality. The grand thing about Marin
is that one step leads always to another, and always is prompted by the consciousness of force
within himself that must be brought to birth. It would be hard to name a man less swayed in
his art by outside influences. His impulse is purely from within; and he is so rarely single-
minded that the following of his own promptings has become as inevitable as breathing.
To many, like myself, his exhibition will bring a singularly choice enjoyment.

Henry Tyrrell in the “Christian Science Monitor” (Boston):
What may be considered in some of its relations the most significant art exhibition on Fifth
Avenue at the present moment—and, in the eyes of a large and growing cult, one that is profuse
in sheer visual beauty of a rarefied sort—holds forth practically unannounced in the littlest
gallery. The exhibition is that of John Marin’s watercolor studies along the Maine coast, done
within the past two years. They are shown appropriately, one may say inevitably—though
some of the big business galleries would be glad to get them now—at Alfred Stieglitz’s Photo-
Secession loft, No. 291 Fifth Avenue.
Six or seven years ago—about the same time, by the way, that Mr. Stieglitz gave to an
unresponsive New York its first Cezanne show, including several of the identical aquarelle
studies now held in high reverence, and at corresponding prices, at the Montross galleries—
John Marin offered his first exhibition here at the Photo-Secession, in conjunction with another
young American artist whose name likewise has since become fairly familiar to the public,
Alfred Maurer. Both were fresh from their Paris studies. Maurer had already enlisted under
the banner of post-impressionism. Marin was just emerging from the spell of Whistler influence,
manifested with quite gratifying results in his etched work especially, to ‘‘find himself,” with
the whole-souled conviction of an imaginative, poetic nature, in Cezanne. He has ever since
eagerly pursued the fair elusive vision, which is the modern muse of abstract expression. It
is a sort of soundless music, or “disembodied beauty,” as some one has happily phrased it.
The Marins at the international “Armory” show, a little later, were mostly emotionalized
skyscrapers, consistent enough with the artist’s subjective mood in viewing concrete material
things, but not comparable to his subsequent ethereal transcriptions of Nature’s own songs.
Sometimes these are the aerial romanzas of the Tyrolese mountain lakes. Latterly, the wild
rocky hillsides, phantasmal trees and infinite vistas of sea and sky along the Maine coast have
supplied the themes. Not the surging, thundering Maine coast of Winslow Homer, but rather
some enchanted solitude like Prospero’s isle in “The Tempest.”
The twenty-odd pictures which are souvenirs of the artist’s sojourn there are not classified,
nor identified in any way. No titles, no catalogue. And indeed, these would be superfluous to the
appreciation of a memory sketch, such as, for instance, this of a crimsoned maple tree—the vital
center though not in the middle of the picture by a long shot—around which all the other fea-
tures of the landscape, felt rather than actually seen, float or rhythmically revolve as in an orbit.
Some of the scenes are more clearly and objectively defined than this; others are even
more vague and nebulous. Yet one and all are flushed with the strange light of fancy that
seems to give the very mists delightful forms, and fill the blank spaces with fascinating patterns.
An effective way of describing these indescribable watercolors of John Marin’s would be
to take some lines from Shelley, and attach them as might seem appropriate—or perhaps better,
at random: ,, _ .
. . . Moments taint
With the delight of a remembered dream,
As are the noontide plumes of summer winds
Satiate with sweet flowers. . . .
Or, for one of the marine vistas:
Look how the gusty sea of mist is breaking
In crimson foam, even at our feet! It rises
As Ocean at the enchantment of the moon.

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