The Ancient Mariner

I guess a picture is good when it just don't irritate the eye. Poetry, imagination, intellect, temperament, oh they can come in on a later train.

Such salty notions, freely expressed and frequently contradicted, have made Painter John Marin's letters a constant delight to his friends. Edited and put between covers, a selection of the letters and of his rather less coherent essays was on sale in U.S. bookstores last week (The Selected Writings of John Marin; Pellegrini & Cudahy; $7.50). Its publication marked the 79th birthday of one of the U.S.'s foremost artists, who has again & again been called "great."

Beware of Swelling. Old John Marin winces at the word. "Don't try to be great," he keeps saying in his letters, "don't try to be important." He recounts how one day, looking at his pictures, his own head began to swell: "It swelled enormously--came near killing me . . ." Nevertheless, like any really fine artist, Marin knows full well the quality of his best work and he cannot help resenting those who don't see it.

"Things should look right," he says, and though he often speaks of having "spoiled" reams of watercolor paper, he is not above bragging a bit when he has translated nature well. Marin's humility before nature, his craftsmanship before his easel and his lonely pride before the world give his letters the tense, half-humorous, contradictory quality that is their main charm.

His most recent works, on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week, almost all reflected his summers spent on the Maine Coast, were full of the contradictory pulls and thrusts of the sea, the wind and the land. "Seems to me," he once wrote, "that the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the elemental big forms --Sky, Sea, Mountain, Plain ... to sort of re-true himself . . ."

That conviction makes him impatient with "expressionist" painting that springs only from imagination. "An idiot surely puts himself into what he does," Marin says, and adds, "the high priest of art don't give a damn who did it." He has even less sympathy for "nonobjective" painters who substitute dead geometry for breathing life.

Curiously, Marin's own pictures are self-expressive and abstract. He usually lets the straight lines and angles that are the scaffolding of his compositions stand in the finished work, and prefers a careless-seeming blot of color to a smooth wash. "The very doing" of a picture, he believes, is part of what the picture has to say, so he makes his paintings look like works-in-progress.

Break the Glass. At first glance the effect is one of sketchiness, but at second it is something altogether different. Many painted landscapes look as if they had been laboriously traced on a pane of glass set between the artist and the scene. Marin's method breaks the glass and lets daylight and fresh air flood in.

A spindly, sharp-beaked crow of a man who spends his winters near Rutherford, N.J., where he was born, Marin has always loved solitude and the sea. His letters to his friend and sponsor, the late great photographer Alfred Stieglitz, were often signed "The Ancient Marin-er." They spoke most of the weather, and mentioned fishing, berrying and hunting as often as art. One such letter, written five years ago, hints at the bigness and joy that the old man still puts in his paintings:

"The Hurricane has just hit--the Seas are Glorious--Magnificent--Tremendous --God be praised that I have yet the vision to see these things."

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