Water-Colorists

Last October, a blond boy on a bicycle left Hollywood, pumping hard, and headed east for Flagstaff, Ariz. Just as the sun rose on the day after Thanksgiving, he dropped his bicycle on his grandmother's frosty lawn in Monroe, N. Y., curled up in a sleeping bag and went to sleep. He felt good, not only because he had covered 3,268 miles on $31 and had averaged 78 strenuous miles a day, but because on his way he had painted about 40 water colors. Last week 25 of them, exhibited at the Manhattan galleries of Charles L. Morgan, made the beginning of a reputation for 21-year-old Eyvind Earle.

Art runs in the Earle family. Eyvind's father, Ferdinand Pinney Earle, is noted not only for five successive marriages and a generally Byronic character but for his writing. He recoined the delicate noun "affinity" into its special sense of "soul mate." A stage designer, he made the Star of Bethlehem and Valley of the Lepers sets in Ben Hur. "Affinity" Earle now lives in France. Eyvind's uncle on his mother's side is slight, dark Dr. William Carlos Williams, the realist poet of Rutherford, N. J.

What Artist Earle crossed the U. S. to see was not city life but countryside. Result: a sheaf of landscapes remarkable for their suggestion of distances, land masses and weather moods, a soft poem of U. S. mountains as Pare Lorentz' documentary movie, The River (TIME, Nov. 8), is a hard poem of U. S. rivers. In Desert Near Santa Fe he caught with a series of fine washes, quickly dried with the brush, the 90-mile, lucent light of the Southwest; in Color Splendor he framed the broad Shenandoah Valley. Critics who doubt the permanency of soft poems noted that in at least one painting, Savage Trees, he swirled a brush full of rich color in a freer, more furious style.

Master. As free and furious as they come is John Marin, the acknowledged master of living U. S. water-colorists and an artist almost certainly great. Last week his old friend and patron, Alfred Stieglitz, opened an exhibition of Marin paintings done during the last two years. To discerning critics they were simpler and more exciting than any previous Marin exhibition.

John Marin is now 67 years old, a wry, shy, wrinkled little man with a long, sharp nose and grey hair in tousled bangs over his forehead. In winter he lives in Cliffside, N. J., and in summer he goes to Stonington, Me. He has not been out of this annual orbit since his two years in Taos, N. Mex. in 1929-30, a period when he says the brilliance of light in the desert made him "continually dippy." Painters like Tintoretto, Rembrandt and Goya he usually refers to as "those old boys." Last week his first visit to Manhattan's Frick Gallery set him wondering what the old boys would think of him. He decided that they would be lenient.

Artist Marin's total disbelief in copying nature, on the ground that anyone would rather have a real ear of corn than a painted one, led him ten years ago to a kind of shorthand in which a triangle represented a sail, a jigging line the sea. In his recent work, extremes of this kind have given place to more effective economies: strokes of color and ragged whites which sometimes fail but more often succeed in bringing to life the "fighting" forces of wind, weight, water and light which he feels in landscape. Marin works over each picture with every watercolorist's trick, "scrubbing in" colors with the brush, tipping the paper for even floods of wash, using his thumb, rags, blotters to get the effect he wants.

Last week's exhibition was notable for the number of human figure studies it included, and for the rarity of a Marin portrait: Myself in Wonder (see cut).

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