JOHN MARIN, THE MAN AND HIS WORK
WORK.By E. M. Benson '27. The American Federation of Asts, Washington, 1935. John Marin is one of the most arresting and original of America's contemporary painters. In his favorite medium, the water color, he has invented and perfected a highly personal, and yet widely effective way of presenting his own intimate ex- periences of nature. As he himself says, The piercing seeing of the object begets an intelligent understanding so that one is equipped for the making of creative forms which have an equivalent balance with those of nature,—therefore becoming natural forms in themselves, created by that natural the artist." Thus a Marin water color is not so much a view of the Maine coast or the New York skyline as it is the artistic equivalent in color and movement, form and space. Marin explains, "I see great forces at work, great movements; the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and the small; influences of one mass on another greater or smaller mass..... Within the frames there must be a balance, a controlling of these warring, pushing, pulling forces. This is what I am trying to realize."
Mr. Benson has written an excellent little monograph, well illustrated and handsomely printed. He reveals Marinas an eminently American person, somewhat suspicious of other people but tremendously in love with and at home with nature. He points out the interesting evolution of Marin's way of painting, and he presents a critical estimate of Marin's work to date. Benson finds this body of work artistically exciting and real, doggedly good, and still on the move. "The road he travels by bears none but his own footprints At sixty-five Marin is still the professional pioneer."
In the Rand McNally Banker's Monthly for December, 1935, appeared an article by Gilbert Balkam '00 entitled Sell Bankingfrom the Customer's Side of the Desk.
Four Thousand Years a Good Drink—inSanskrit They Called It "Ali," by Percy Noel '09 appears in the February issue of Europe an American Monthly.
