Colorful Shorthand

As he has often done in the past 27 years. Alfred Stieglitz, photographer and art dealer, last week gave over his bleak, hospital-like Manhattan gallery to the paintings of his best friend. A wrinkled, shock-headed little man of 65, John Marin looks like a disheveled version of the late Sir Henry Irving. Because a new book on Artist Marin has just been published,* because critics like Henry McBride, Lewis Mumford and Julius Meier-Graefe have put themselves on record as considering John Marin the greatest water-colorist in the U. S., it was an important exhibit.

Marin's name rhymes with barren. He likes to play down his ancestry (French-Dutch-Scotch-English), play up his U. S. birth and training. Twenty-seven years ago Stieglitz found Marin an art student in Paris, earning a skimpy living by meticulously etching French cathedrals in the Whistler manner. Rebelling at this finicky scratchwork, Marin would rush out to the country, splash gobs of water color around with one of the biggest brushes he could find. Dealer Stieglitz did not think much of the etchings, but grew so excited about the water colors that he practically adopted John Marin there & then. Ever since, he has handled Marin's finances and all his pictures, never accepting a cent in commissions. To date the artist has produced some 800 works--oils, water colors, etchings. Record price for Marin water colors was reached in 1928, when one went for $6,100. Yet Dealer Stieglitz has let some go for as little as $100 apiece, provided he thought the purchaser a worthy person who could not afford more.

Many people, including John Marin, have written a great deal in explanation of John Marin's art, It is simplest to call his work shorthand notes for pictures by a man with a fine sense of color, a riotous imagination and a hand disciplined by years of technical training. To many observers his blobs of pure color splashed loosely on big sheets of crinkly paper are more suggestive of the sea, sky, ships and mountains than all the careful paintings of the same subjects inside gilt frames in a dozen academies. Gallery-goers last week made much of the fact that Artist Marin seemed to be turning more & more from his water colors to oils.

Living in bourgeois simplicity in Cliffside, N. J. with his wife and 21-year-old son, Artist Marin gave himself the luxury of a private studio for the first time in his life two months ago. He knocked the partition out between two small rooms. Always wearing high, stiff collars, he goes fishing whenever possible, likes billiards and tinkering his ancient Chandler automobile. Art groups he studiously avoids, has no truck with young people who paint abstractions. The abstract quality in his own paintings he hints at in his titles. A picture is apt to be called not Stonington Harbor, but Pertaining to Stonington Harbor.

*JOHN MARIN, THE MAN AND His WORK, by E. M. Benson--American Federation of Arts $2.50.

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