Water Color Man

Alfred Stieglitz, who has the hairiest ears and the most positive opinions of any dealer in New York, opened his autumn season fortnight ago with an exhibition by that darling of the cognoscenti, John Marin, No. i man in that collection of artists which Alfred Stieglitz has so successfully cherished and promoted that they are known as the "Stieglitz Group."*

Murdock Pemberton, art critic of the New Yorker, has said before witnesses that John Marin is the greatest living U. S. painter. Critic Ralph Flint feels before a Marin picture "as though a Catherine wheel were going off inside me." The New York Evening Post spoke of "his power to make a picture more in tensely real than reality." The Sun said: ". . . The Mozart of water-colorists, and in other times when thunderous and soul- shattering, he has been likened to Beethoven."

Before the bleak, hospital-white walls of his gallery splattered with Marin water colors, Dealer Stieglitz stood belligerently trying to explain to reporters what there is about these pictures, formless daubs to many an initiate, that causes such enthusiasm. Said he:

"I've known John Marin 22 years. . . . He is a realist, a colorist, an artist and a poet. He is important because he has taken water color painting which has always been a minor art, and made of it a major medium."

John Marin was born in Rutherford, N. J. 60 years ago. His. long lank hair is still brown, makes him look like a smaller, sallower edition of the late Sir Henry Irving. He habitually wears high stiff collars, enjoys fishing. It is 22 years since Alfred Stieglitz, a distinguished photographer in his own right, first found John Marin in Paris making a precarious living by meticulously etching French cathedrals in the Whistler manner. In reaction to this intricate scratchwork he would go to the country, paint rapidly with loose splashes of color. Alfred Stieglitz had little sympathy with the Whistlerian etchings, but greatly admired the Marin water colors which were in reality shorthand notes for pictures by a man with a laborious technical background, an uncanny sense of color.

John Marin returned to the U. S., realized that there he could do his best work. Stieglitz gave him his first exhibition in 1910, has stood sponsor for his artistic career, guardian of his finances ever since. About five years ago the chorus of critical praise began humming. It became smart to own a Marin, expensive to buy one. Pictures that were little more than large sheets of rough paper with a few expertly placed blobs of color, brought $1,000, $2,000 and eventually $4,000.

Canny Promoter Stieglitz puts no set price on a Marin.

"What is the value of a picture?" asks he dramatically. "Is it $50, or $5,000? I don't know. . . . The important thing is that John Marin has got to live. The butcher has got to be paid. The record price for a Marin last year was $6,500. On the other hand I let a working girl have one, a good one too, who could only afford $100. I want to know who the buyer is, what he can afford to pay and where he lives, for the home a picture is going to is important. You know if I put a label, '50 -c-' on this picture, John D. Rockefeller would never offer me 60 -c-."

In his last exhibition were Manhattan skyscrapers and views of a Maine coast familiar to Marinites. New were the pictures of New Mexico, vivid snapshots of pueblos, mountains, Indian dances, made during a summer visit to Taos.

Mohawk Brown

New York and Atlanta had a chance last week to inspect the work of a spectacular newcomer to the world of art. In Atlanta's High Museum of Art were 46 water colors, in New York's Arden Galleries 16 more, by Douglas Brown, Indian- blooded Harvard man.

Born in Cherry Valley, N. Y., swart-skinned, jet-haired Douglas Brown whose ancestors were Mohawks was an Army officer at the age of 17, graduated from Harvard (1920) at an untimely age. He answered one of Thomas Alva Edison's famed questionnaires so astutely that he got a position in the Edison laboratories, specializing in lighting. To the cinema studios then went he and invented special lighting effects for Gloria Swanson's The Humming Bird. Drifting to New Orleans, he became manager of a Little Theatre, hobnobbed with the intelligentsia of Tulane University. Somebody told him he should be an artist. So Douglas Brown became an artist. Scorning art schools, he invented his own technique. Scorning easels, palettes and other effete appurtenances, he paints crosslegged on the ground with his picture on a piece of cardboard in his lap.

A hundred miles down the delta from New Orleans, Artist Brown discovered Boothville, La., on a peninsula 30 mi. long inhabited exclusively by leggers, river pilots and orange growers who live in houses raised on stilts to protect them from sudden floods and hurricanes. There he spends six months each year. His girl there was a beautiful redhead who was supposed to have descended from pirate stock. She eloped with a butcher boy.

"Boothville people are wealthy," said Artist Brown. "Every tenth house is a poolroom or saloon and they have four or five dances a week."

Artist Brown draws as he talks, crudely, positively, in a manner that admits of no erasures, no changes. He applies color in broad flat washes. Critics find his matter pleasing, his manner undeveloped. They take refuge in the safe expression, "promising."

Good for Stamps

Last week, by the terms of the will of Mrs. Louis McLane Tiffany of Baltimore, the University of Virginia became the owner of a portrait of George Washington, hitherto unknown to the public (see cut), presumably painted from life, the work of Rembrandt Peale. Simultaneously it became known that another Washington portrait had been brought to light. It was done by Rembrandt Peale's father Charles Willson Peale, has hung for years in Richmond's quiet Westmoreland Club. This canvas was "discovered" by one who dispenses portraits of the first U. S. President at 2 -c- each by the millions: Post master General Walter Folger Brown. An nounced he: "It is a novel portrait -and a good portrait -one I had never seen copied before. We hope to show, in stamps, Washington as a youth, as a civil engineer, as commander-in-chief of the Army, and so on through his life. The Richmond portrait depicts him about the time when he went out with Braddock."

* The Stieglitz Group: John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe (Mrs. Stieglitz), Arthur G. Dove, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Photographer Paul Strand.

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