John Marin [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520338258

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S U N S E T . Water color, 1922. Mrs.

Edith

Gregor

Holpert,

New

York

JOHN MARIN Tributes by W i l l i a m Carlos W i l l i a m s / Duncan Phillips / D o r o t h y N o r m a n

Conclusion to a Biography by M a c K i n l e y H e l m

John Marin—Frontiersman by F r e d e r i c k S . W i g h t

University

of

California

Press,

Berkeley

and

Los

Angeles,

1956

University of C a l i f o r n i a Press Berkeley a n d Los A n g e l e s , C a l i f o r n i a C a m b r i d g e University Press London, England C o p y r i g h t , 1 9 5 6 , by The Regents of the University of C a l i f o r n i a Library of Congress C a t a l o g u e C a r d N o . 56-6988 Designed by Sherman Rifkin

BACK OF BEAR M O U N T A I N . Water color, 1925. Phillips

Gallery,

Washington,

D.C,

T h e occasion responsible for the publication of this book is the John M a r i n Memorial Exhibition, organized by the A r t G a l l e r i e s of the U n i v e r s i t y of California, Los Angeles, and shown in 1 9 5 5 - 1 9 5 6 at the f o l l o w i n g participating institutions: Museum of Fine A r t s , Boston; Phillips G a l l e r y , W a s h i n g t o n , D. C.; San Francisco Museum of A r t ; A r t G a l l e r i e s , U n i v e r s i t y of California, Los Angeles; Cleveland Museum of A r t ; M i n neapolis Institute of Arts; Society of the Four A r t s , Palm Beach, Florida; U n i v e r s i t y of Georgia, Athens; and W h i t n e y Museum of American A r t , N e w Y o r k . T h a n k s are due to the many collectors and institutions whose generous loans made the exhibition (and therefore this volume) possible. T h e editor wishes to thank M r s . Dorothy N o r m a n and F a r r a r , Straus and Young for permission to quote from the Selected

Writings

of John Marin.

He would like

also to acknowledge the general support drawn from many w r i t i n g s on John M a r i n , in particular from the work of E. M. Benson and from the catalogues of the Museum of Modern A r t , N e w Y o r k , and of the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. T I M E M a g a z i n e has made available the color plates Sun, Isles and Sea and Sea Piece,- L I F E Magazine, Boat and Sea — Deer Mexico;

and Machias,

Isle,

Maine

Series;

Maine,- and Coward-McCann, Inc., Lower

T h i s book is dedicated to John M a r i n , Jr.

Corn Dance, Manhattan.

New

Y O U N G M A N OF THE SEA. Alfred

Stieglitz

Coll.,

W a f e r c o l o r , 1934.

Metropolitan

Museum of Art,

New

York

A small plant, perhaps a weed, certainly a weed, growing from a split stem in a certain patch of ground, that's what we were, one to wax into a painter, Marin, and one into myself. W e were born within half a mile of each other and never moved over a few miles apart all our lives. W e knew of each other towards the end of our later years, even met and understood each other completely but never grew intimate. W o u l d you expect more of our twin stem? W e had business to do, which we shared; to do more would have interfered each with the other's privileges, our opportunities and aspirations which were largely the same in each case. W e had confidence, implicit confidence, in each other, for were we not from the same root. It is good economy (since we were not in the same specific field) for each to mind his own business. W e thus presented one front to the enemy. I always thought John Marin a flaming expression of the ground from which we both sprang. He was an affirmation of all that I felt of it that comforted me W I L L I A M

in times of stress, which I needed in my daily life. I could count on him to back me up. ^ e s e things are often expressed by us in the

CARLOS

world, more's the pity. But in our world, the world in WILLIAMS

which we live in this part of Jersey, we take such sentiments for granted. It is only at the end that we permit such expressions to gain the upper hand. It is best so. W e are told that the anodic opening but especially the kathodic closing of the current, mark the times of greatest stress. Let it be so with me. I am certain that is how, if he were still alive, John Marin would have wanted it: his paintings remain.

1919

It seems that Old Man God when

he made this part of the Earth just took a shovel full of islands and let them drop.

M A I N E I S L A N D S . Water color, 1922. Phillips

Callery,

Washington,

D.C.

John Marin has passed into history. He n o w takes his place in the story of American painting with Whistler and Homer and Ryder. To each of them he had some affinity: to Whistler in his ability to vignette the pictorial essence of a moment of vision; to Homer in his passion for and knowledge of the sea off the coast of Maine and in his special mastery of water color as a medium; and to Ryder in his self-reliant invention and his integrity. Marin's telegraphic speed and fresh, exuberant expression may seem at art's opposite pole from Ryder's long cherished dream and labored alchemy. Yet for me their basic kinship is very real. They were Yankees both and ancient mariners both, the lonely voyager over the perils of enameled pigments and untraveled, profoundly imaginative designs, and the bold adventurer of the moment's intuition w h o knew all the ways of the sea, w h o dared to be the intimate, the on-thespot reporter of the flashing lights, the thrashing waves, the thrusts and tensions for which he knew the axis and the resolving balance. Marin had no equal as a wizard of equilibrium within a space construction of precariously active lines. His dynamism and his spontaneity are, w e like to think, American qualities, yet surely no more so than the D U N C A N PHILLIPS

persistent inner vision of Ryder whose imagery was less of the adventuring eye and hand than of the withdrawn, contemplative mind. Ryder and Marin were nature poets whose complete absorption in their own intimate sources of inspiration resulted in works of art so different that their only underlying resemblances to each other were their single-minded independence and their regional American expression transcended by intimations of the universal. W e are witnessing a period in art of private symbols and of subconscious calligraphy. It is really a survival of romanticism whether the romance has to d o with the exploration of space at the expense of the picture plane or the discovery of drama in design itself. This new manifestation of art for art's sake is called abstract expressionism and becomes fanatical when it is merely automatic writing by a more or less uncontrolled hand. It may be claimed that John Marin, especially in his latest canvases, when he opened up his compositions from their former enclosures, extending the rhythms and cross

currents

W O O L W O R T H B U I L D I N G No. 31. Water color, 1912. Mrs. Eugene Meyer, Washington,

D.C.

around and beyond the frames, anticipated such improvisations, just as the cubists could claim him because of his superimposed planes and the geometrical shapes which he used arbitrarily. Yet whatever he did was independent of all isms and his impetuosity was that of a poet-painter who used abbreviations and formal idioms either as means to convey his visual sensations or of extending the painter's expressive freedoms. His genius for explosions of line and color, especially in the Manhattan street scenes, was dedicated to the theme of energy. Marin regarded himself as a lyrical realist, which of course he was, although an expressionist rather than an impressionist by temperament. His triangle for a pine or his zigzag for a wave was crisply, almost colloquially descriptive and the rectangles and the handsome hieroglyphics with which he played were frankly decorative and never abstract or automatic. Mere illusion was seldom, if ever, his aim even in the representative landscapes of Maine, New Hampshire and New Mexico. He wished to paint "after nature's example" and with an intensified economy of means appropriate to the tempo of his period. It is true that he aspired to the abstract condition of music, that he wished to make his art as structural and sequential as Bach. "That is the kind of music my piano likes to have played on it," he remarked to MacKinley Helm when his visitor, who later became his biographer, found him practising his favorite composer in the glassed-in veranda of his cottage by the sea. "Did

you

note how the little tunes struck at each other? Balance

and

Force."

Just as his piano liked that kind of music so his

paper had its own enjoyments. "You just put down a color that the paper will like." This reveals that Marin was not only an expressionist but a virtuoso in love with water color, his favorite instrument. Later in such oils as the

musically organized Tonk Mountain in Autumn he was equally solicitous for the special needs of the canvas and the colors. For a half-century of research and urgency he experimented on the frontiers of visual consciousness and his ardours amounted to a joyous dynamic pantheism. Far from escaping from our tragic world into abstraction he seemed to challenge fate with an ever brave and debonair philosophy of design.

4 t K " « ?7

WHITE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY, DIXVILLE NOTCH, No. 1. Wafer color, 1927. Mrs. Dorothy

1946

Norman, New

York

For these big forms have every-

thing. But to express

these, you have to

this love, this love to enfold too the relatively little things that grow on the moun-

love these, to be a part of these in sym-

tain's back. Which if you don't

pathy. One doesn't get very far

you don't recognize

without

recognize,

the mountain.

To the very end of his life Marin retained and utilized with masterful vitality his ability to communicate magically his subtle attunement with what he liked to call the great nature forms—the great nature forces. To the very end of his life he inveighed passionately against the arid high priests of mere theory and dogma; against the pretentious declaimers of "Thou shalt not look," "Thou shalt not feel"; against those who cared not for health, quality, integrity, beauty. There was but one approach that moved Marin: that of the lover. There was but one story he wished to hear and to tell: the love story. In one of his last letters he said it quite clearly: "Ah—the and

bring her close—He

meadow—and

lover—He can love

can love a

woman

the flower

of the

bring it close. . . ." It was Marin's power

to transform the "far" into the life-giving, love-giving, song-giving "near" that will make his work endure. Too, he was an excellent critic, with his strict sense of

DOROTHY NORMAN

form and balance, his deep respect for the "basic laws" of nature. He was fascinated by those moments when a seeming clash between the different facets of nature illuminated a more profound pulling together. He responded with joy when there was a sense of fitness in man-made objects. A bridge had to have a sense of permanency for him, a solid feel about it; a chair to be completely, honestly a chair—to relate fittingly to the form of man. A boat riding the waves must be equal to its task—seaworthy. The sailor must sail his boat in sensitive manner, be one with boat and sea. W h e n sailor, boat, sea, landscape all were "a-moving" together, when all were as "one" for him, then there would be the excitement that would bring forth a Marin picture, letter, a "singing" in one form or another. "Art," Marin once wrote, "is produced by the wedding of man and nature. W h e n man loves material and will not under any circumstances destroy its own inherent beauty then and then only can that wonderful thing we call art be created." It was in this spirit that he made his own art. It is for this that he should be universally saluted.

LOWER M A N H A T T A N . Water color, 1920. Mr.

Philip

L. Goodwin,

New

York

I

The most remarkable thing about John Marin, to my way of thinking, is that he never had to make

up his mind between sundry wants. H i s eye was

single from childhood. He may have wandered; he was never lost. He made a large life out of small elements. His whole body was full of light. The outward, observable elements of Marin's existence were so few that they can be named in a sentence: a piano, a rowboat, an easel; the city in winter, the sea in the summer; a narrow, inconspicuous circle of friends; and occasional unscheduled treats such as a concert of Bach,

a trip to the circus, a set of custom-made shirts. Perhaps disciplined rather than born to wantlessness—in his fiftieth year he had to make do with two hundred dollars from the Fourth of July up to Christmas—he reached magnitude out of simplicity. I remember an invitation to lunch at his house in Cliffside, New Jersey. "Come over," said M a r i n — I had called C O N C L U S I O N A

TO

BIOGRAPHY

MacKINLEY

HELM

up from Manhattan—"I am putting a mackerel into the oven. He's a nice big fellow, we will eat him for

lunch."

So we made a wonderful lunch on basted baked mackerel, bread and butter, and tea—with much talk about painting. N o w the Misses Currey, his cousins, would have sent in a cake (so they said) if they had known I was coming. Mrs. Marin, the dove, the dear, cote-loving spirit, would have seen, had she still been alive, to a good boiled potato and a pie of Maine berries. But then, Mrs. Marin and the Misses Lyda and Retta would not have been turned aside by such delightful complexities. Their domain was his nurture. W i t h Marin, the slow breath of the unemployed interval, as against the quick breath of creation, was intended precisely for the concentrated yet unhurried meditation, the composed, wasteless criticism, the judgment that issued from undivided attention,- the object of the trance, the discussion, the verdict, being always, of course, the last Marin picture: a picture that had come into being in its inescapable moment because the workroom was bare of distracting adornment; because unopened letters turned moldy,- because loneliness had been thoughtfully transformed into solitude. And because, whether as nour-

ishment for creation or judgment, a fat mackerel or a mess of home-grown garden peas " d i d " for the day. The mature expression in painting of Marin's oneness was anticipated, as the painter has told us, by a boyhood preoccupation with drawing that was equaled only by a passion for fishing. In Delaware, on his Uncle Dick Currey's peach farm, he was obliged to read indoors every day from the Bible. Out-of-doors, he drew rabbits bounding over the bracken. Back home in New Jersey, he took the line of passive resistance to all teachers but Euclid; suffered through eight winters of pent-up boredom. In summer, called back to life by the streams and meadows and forests, he filled page after notebook

page with tidy

signed landscapes. A tiny remainder shows him observing with particular care the conspicuous features of the Jersey coast and the Catskill Mountains. After the school days (there was one year in college) Marin sat out a few years of week days at architects' drawing boards and sketched and painted from nature on Sundays. He branched out to build a few plain houses on a N e w Jersey hill—nothing fine, nothing fancy—and subsidized with his profits an offsetting Wanderjahr

for each

of the years he had spent stifled in offices. And here is something to notice: the farther afield went the wandering artist, the less "realistic" the drawings set down in the notebooks. H i s Germantown houses were brick and stone houses, as his Catskill cows had been cows in real meadows. And that was quite natural. Their author had come fresh from the study of blueprints and had lots of time, so he thought, to copy things down. But out in the farther world, the world of the nearer South and the West, time lapped itself up. There had been nothing like this in the life of John Marin: so much more than he dreamed of to see and record, the sun racing to thwart him. So what did he do? He taught his pencil to race after the sunlight. He taught his pen—it had no other teacher—a rapid new language. (In later years, he loved to speak of his drawings as " w r i t i n g s . " ) The aunts back home could see only squiggles when they looked at a drawing called

Wisconsin Forma-

t i o n . " I t ' s beyond us," said the aunts.

GREY SEA. Phillips

Gallery,

Water color, 1924. Washington,

D.C.

®L ri»

"IP

••

ft

'

®

-»=1—f

w RIVER MOVEMENT — D O W N T O W N . Mr.

and

Mrs.

Lawrence

LONDON OMNIBUS. Allred

Stieglitz

Coll.,

Fleischman,

Water color, 1910.

Detroit

Water color, 1908.

Metropolitan

Museum

ol Art,

New

York

Marin was no longer a boy, he was twenty-seven, when he went back to Union H i l l in N e w Jersey with his notebooks of sketches set down in a kind of artistic shorthand with symbols for houses and clouds and trees. If his father was puzzled, the aunts were embarrassed. H o w was their nephew to be explained to the neighbors? They washed their hands and sent him to art school—at his father's expense.

2

As Marin's biographer, I have been quarreled with—very politely—for holding a negative view of the painter's relationship to the great

excluder, the great simplifier, the last Impressionist, the great Paul Cézanne. I have received generous offers of evidence intended to show that the Marin I knew did not issue from chaos until he was called by a voice from a French-speaking heaven: " C o m e and let us unflesh our pictorial universe." But I never felt that such evidence was wholly persuasive. In the first place, I had seen the Marin I knew taking shape in the notebooks when Cézanne was unknown in America and only beginning to be talked of in Paris. In the second place—though I have rarely found painters to be perfectly candid on the subject of influence—I accepted Marin's assurance that he was not aware of Cézanne until 1911. I mean now to take note of this matter in a context of biography. It is perfectly possible that Marin spoke truly when he said he first saw the work of Cézanne at Alfred Stieglitz's Fifth Avenue gallery in 1911. Up to 1 8 9 5 , Marin's whole circle of impersonal acquaintance with living artists was made up of the Shakespearean illustrator, Edwin A. Abbey, and the Harper's

New

Monthly

Magazine

drafts-

men—Remington, Pennell, Sterner, du Maurier, G i b s o n — and in addition, some wet-paper aquarellists from England whose names he could not later remember. (One can guess at people like David Cox and de Wint.) At the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where both students and faculty chose the side of expatriate Sargent or ex-

1937

I do have scorn for those

just by giving the American

locale—hoist

themselves upon us as Artists—just they use the—American

who

locale—

because

S T O C K E X C H A N G E , N E W Y O R K C I T Y . Water color, 1924. Mr. David Solinger, New York

patriate Whistler, Marin chose Whistler, from whom there derived a sometimes too obvious influence: though Marin's first income from sales, thirty dollars for thirty small Wanderjahr drawings, went into an English edition of the work of Máxime Lalanne, a conservative French landscape engraver whom Marin also admired. The latter connection, by a traceable route, bypassed the Impressionists and led back to Rembrandt. Abbey and Whistler and Lalanne and Rembrandt had already caught Marin's eye when the aunts in New Jersey learned the discouraging news that art school had failed to make their nephew a man—he used to say of himself that he was " a kid up to thirty"—and

these were the

artists whose techniques he began to copy when, four or five years after he left the Academy, he went over to Paris. The aunts had concurred in a family judgment that so useless a person as John might as well go abroad. Paul Rosenfeld described Marin in Bohemian Paris in his thirty-fifth year as a "slight, medium-tall, somewhat slouchy figure"

with a piquant face "like a wizened

apple." He looked, said Rosenfeld, like a Yankee farmer, with the "curious personal dignity and simplicity" of that northern type. The "Yankee farmer," loafing at sidewalk cafés with other Americans, learned that Whistler, the lately-dead Whistler, was the sensation of the advanced Yankee guard. Marin was gratified. But he likewise discovered Charles Méryon, a French engraver who, like Whistler, left lots of things out of his plates in his play for subtle design and soft atmosphere. He made a few Whistlers and Méryons for the dealers and was afterwards thankful that they did not sell easily. For in the end, he felt that what he himself must be after was the exposure and not the befogging of the bare bones of nature. This object, he thought, was

best accomplished, in printing, with the

deep clear lines of the Rembrandt etchings. After 1906, with three commercial exceptions, his own plates were pure Marin in subject matter and handling. They simplified, they ejaculated. W h i l e he was feeling his way back, in the etchings, to the decade of symbolic drawing that began in Wisconsin,

OFF Y O R K ISLAND, MAINE. Alfred

Stieglitz

Coll.,

Water color, 1922.

Philadelphia

Museum of Art

RED S U N — A l f r e d Stieglitz

B R O O K L Y N BRIDGE. Coll.,

Art Institute

of

W a t e r c o l o r , 1922. Chicago

M a r i n t o o k u p p a i n t i n g as w e l l . O n e o f his c r o n i e s , a c o m p a n i o n a t billiards, w a s G e o r g e O b e r t e u f f e r , a n A m e r i c a n artist w h o w a s w o r k i n g in Paris in the Impressionist m a n n e r — a kind o f p o s t h u m o u s enterprise u n d e r t a k e n b y f o r e i g n e r s in t h a t s o m e t i m e c a p i t a l o f the o b s o l e t e Impressionist m o v e m e n t — a n d p e r h a p s it w a s O b e r t e u f f e r w h o p e r s u a d e d him t o p l a y w i t h w h i t e p a p e r as he h a d p l a y e d w i t h the plates. A t a n y rate, after m a k i n g s o m e paintings o f mills in the English t r a d i t i o n , he p a i n t e d o n e o r t w o w a t e r c o l o r s in the p a l p a b l y A m e r i c a n Impressionist style. In 1 9 0 9 , the first " M a r i n s " a p p e a r e d . T h o u g h these w e r e n o t yet the t h o u g h t f u l l y g e o m e t r i c a l M a r i n s , t h e y r e m a i n instantly r e c o g n i z a b l e as e a r l y e x a m p l e s o f the p o e t i c a p p r o a c h w h i c h M a r i n w a s t o m a k e t o n e w subject matter f o r the rest o f his life. It w a s n o t until he r e t u r n e d t o A m e r i c a t h a t he m a d e his brush d o w h a t he h a d d o n e w i t h a c i d a n d p e n c i l ; a n d even then, like as n o t , the pencil o r c r a y o n in the left h a n d instructed the right

h a n d t h a t l a i d o n the c o l o r s .

3

Five irrelevant y e a r s h a d d r a g g e d themselves o u t in Paris, w i t h M a r i n o d d l y indifferent t o t h e a r t o f the past a n d o n l y p o o r l y instructed

in the a r t o f the present. I m a d e this d i s c o v e r y w h e n I t r i e d

t o g e t him t o talk a b o u t painters in g e n e r a l , h o p i n g t o f i n d here o r t h e r e s o m e c l u e , a d e t a i l , a n index a p r o p o s his a p p r e n t i c e s h i p : s o m e t h i n g t o illustrate o r enrich o r r o u n d o u t a picture that I c o u l d h o l d in m y m i n d ; as in s p e a k i n g t o V i r g i n i a W o o l f , I might i n q u i r e w h a t she t h o u g h t o f T o m Eliot. But a p a r t f r o m the artists I h a v e a l r e a d y n a m e d , a n d b e f o r e his distinguished c o n n e c t i o n w i t h A l f r e d Stieglitz's succession o f galleries, there w e r e o n l y t w o historical aspects o f p a i n t i n g t h a t M a r i n a c k n o w l e d g e d in o u r l o n g c o n v e r s a t i o n s — t h e V e n e t i a n a n d Dutch. H e h a d visited V e n i c e a n d liked T i n t o r e t t o f o r the w a y he a n i m a t e d his figures in s p a c e . H e liked the little Dutch f l o w e r paintings a n d still lifes in A m s t e r d a m b e c a u s e he felt t h e y h a d b e e n p a i n t e d w i t h l o v e . As f o r the Louvre, the P r a d o , the Uffizi, their w a l l s w e r e hung w i t h w o r k s f r o m the houses o f strangers. N o . For M a r i n , a r t w a s n o t history. A r t f o r him w a s n o t h o u s e d in the galleries. A r t w a s a mystical s o m e -

thing between Manhattan and Marin, a personal something between Marin and Maine. Yet I cannot abandon the subject of Marin's contact with history without recording his display, on a special occasion, of immense admiration for the French master Cézanne. O n my last visit to Cliffside in winter, when Marin's own work was reaching its climax, John Marin, Jr., said that his father would like me to accompany him to the Cézanne Exhibition on display in N e w York. He had been ill, I was warned, and must take it easy. I briefed myself for our joint expedition by spending three morning hours in the Metropolitan galleries, and I remember thinking, as I looked at the pictures, that I must again come to grips—who had said that I hadn't?— with the critical problem of Cézanne and Marin. But I kept drifting off from that project, now losing interest in the trite landscape palette (I loved Marin's red oceans); now seeing in pallid sketches the absence of structure (Marin's structures were plate glass and iron). Then I would blink my eyes and look hard and see that in spite of the cyclical fumbling and failure—as lamented so keenly in Cézanne's anguished letters—there were more fabulous signs than I had remembered, caught somehow in the painter's overearnest endeavor, of a new concept of painting to which Marin had clearly referred in some water colors he had made one summer at Egremont Plains, in the Berkshires, and kept fresh in his mind for the next forty years. This was a new and reticent and highly professional concept of surface in which tones and arrangements of color stood out in their planes not as form, as is frequently said, but for distance and atmosphere. (Marin, I still maintained, was the greater constructor of landscape.) I drew a map for a tour of a little more than an hour and then I went to the Downtown Gallery to meet Marin for lunch. Marin was perched on a sofa in an upstairs room when I appeared in the doorway. He shouted, " C o m e in!" and turning to Mrs. Halpert, his dealer, and others, he said, "Here's

a man that don't go out and buy

shirts!" I know that I dropped the thread that had led me from Cézanne and Paris and I suppose I looked lost.

MOVEMENT — FIFTH AVENUE. A l f r e d Stieglitz

Coll.,

W a t e r color, 1912.

Art Institute

of Chicago

"Imagine,"

said M a r i n , "these people

have been

ing to get me to go out and buy shirts. Gentlemen

trydon't

go out and buy shirts, I keep saying. They have their shirts made. Let's go,"

he said brightly.

He t o o k me to lunch at the Restaurant St. Denis, one of his latter-day substitutes for the o l d H o l l a n d House, a n d when w e w e n t to take up our table, twenty people s t o o d up. "What

did those people

get up for?"

he asked, when

w e had taken our places. I said, ' O u t of respect for y o u , M r . Marin. They are g l a d to see that y o u are in circulation a g a i n . " "Is that so?" he said, looking pleased a n d incredulous. "Whoever

would

think that I was a

lion?"

I nearly lost him under a truck after lunch, he was so eager to hail a c a b a n d get going. At the Museum, w e w e r e f o l l o w e d upstairs to the Cézanne Exhibition by a g r o u p of young people w h o recognized M a r i n from the frequently-photographed bangs a n d the wrinkles a n d the brisk t w e e d y carriage. I suppose there w e r e a b o u t fifty admirers in all before the tour ended. As w e passed in procession from one r o o m to another, M a r i n stopped n o w a n d then to l o o k at the c r o w d w e w e r e trailing behind us. He b o w e d , smiled, a n d beckoned, a n d in a large r o o m filled with big, splendid paintings, he lifted his hand for attention. "Young T H E UTTLE S A I L B O A T . Mr.

W o t e r color, 1924.

and M r s . Robert Straus,

Houston

people,"

he said, "I hope you all realize

you are seeing the pictures world

began."

of the great painter

that

since the

M y quotation is literal. I w r o t e it d o w n on

the spot. The young people a p p l a u d e d . O n the w a y back to the D o w n t o w n G a l l e r y , I said that I supposed that Mr. Marin was thinking a b o u t Western art when he praised Cezanne so delightfully. " G i v e me a Sung Dynasty landscape,"

I said,

"to

you have it,"

he

w a n d e r a r o u n d in." Marin's tired face lighted up. "Ah, said. "You have it. Those old fellows

knew how to make

pictures." If y o u loved subject matter, Marin always insisted, y o u never let g o of it. But y o u made a picture. You put in structure a n d movement, tension a n d equilibrium. You put

in space for the spectator to enter, suggestions—symbols of color as well as of form—for the spectator's imagination to sort out and ponder. If you were Chinese, you left out the obvious, ambiguous shadows, you omitted the boring details of the overabundance of nature. And if you were Marin, I wanted to add, you put in a beguiling mixture of elegance, gaiety. Back at the gallery, I had my first view of the new Marin Room, a small chamber arranged for the perpetual exhibition and sale of the paintings. Just outside the entrance there hung one of the oils, a painting whose source I identified in a remembered moment offshore in Pleasant Bay as we neared Marin's house at Cape Split from a day of salt-water fishing. A blue stream and a green one met and tormented each other, the falling sun lighted the conflict. "Put that in a picture," believe

said Marin, "and no one would

it."

But here was the picture. Blue stream, green stream, and a symbolic red disk between them. Abstract? N o t at all. If you had glimpsed the method, the picture was " r e a l . " And the subject needed the volume, the stately solidity that the oil colors gave it. " H e r e at last, Mr. M a r i n , " I said, looking on into the room where his pictures were hanging, " y o u can show the oil paintings as much as you like." MOVEMENT No. 2 — RELATED T O D O W N T O W N , N E W Y O R K (BLACK S U N ) . Water color, 1926. Alfred

Stieglitz

Coll.,

Metropolitan

Museum of Art,

New

York

4

The Marin I knew was a happy man, I was sure. Unlike poor Goethe, who testified to a long life of ill-being, Marin seemed to enjoy a

long life of well-being: eudaemonia of strict definition in that it flowed from unmixed activity begotten by instinct and governed by reason. As in the life of most men, there were times when his seasons were spare. There were brief interludes of depression and illness; longer stretches of grieving. But Marin kept going. His head said, " N a t u r e and art will bare me their secrets." Nature and art proved magnanimous, hence his life was felicitous. In autumn evenings on the porch at Cape Split, when we turned from the darkening sky to light up the walls and

look at the pictures, Marin talked freely about his professional life, and the only unreconciled discontent that I ever heard him express was that his oil paintings had not, somehow, caught on. The fact caused him distress, deep distress. For twenty-odd years, that sad fact cast shadows. I say twenty years. Though Marin's use of oil pigmentation went back thirty years farther, it was not until 1931, it appeared, that he began to feel the frequent necessity of using oil colors for containing impressions too profound for transparencies. In the frosty winter of 1903-04, he had used up the whole extravagant purchase of one hundred 9" x 12" canvas-faced panels in exploring the wide, busy surface and the rural and urban laterals of the Hudson River. While he was at the Art Students' League, and four years later in France, he worked at odd times on canvas. In 1928, in the "Region of Sparkill," he made some oil and tempera paintings soon banished to the Manhattan warehouse where he kept what he called his "Dark Room Collection." Three years passed before Marin took up the thick colors again—compelled by the sea in spite of the warning that what he might do with those colors would not find a market. Marin gaily explained that he had to use opaque pigment when the well water ran low. The Maine coast was benign when the Marins drove down East to Small Point in the summer of 1931: unforgettably lovely, unforgettably beautiful, said Marin to Stieglitz. Even the sea was benign: coy, womanly, smiling. Marin unpacked his transparent colors and went to work in the lyrical mood with which he always matched the bright morning of nature. (One can see that the paintings on paper of that year and the next are as choice as anything to be found in the first half of the whole Marin corpus: unless one is ordained to believe that at Stonington, 1928, Marin reached a peak of witty and graceful and dashing perfection with transparent color.) But came a change in the weather. The sea grew mighty and masculine. The shore braced her body against her too furious lover. How could one show the passionate onslaught, the heroic resistance in transparent color? One couldn't. Marin brought out the tubes of oil paint. I find a figure from Endymion in the notes that I made

CORN DANCE, NEW MEXICO. Water color, 1929. Allred

Stieglitz

Coll.,

Metropolitan

Museum of Art,

New

York

after viewing the lusty oils of that summer and the eight thickly-pigmented seascapes of the next stormy season. Marin, I wrote, had been blown across the wild beach. The "giant sea" rose over his head. The close approach of ocean as he expressed it in piled-up paint on big canvas was a prodigy of both feeling and technique. But his friends and the public were not yet ready to follow him into the storm. The dazzling new oils went into the Dark Room Collection. "They say of 'The Place' that my oil paintings don't fly," said Marin sadly, the day we went to the West Side warehouse. "Hell,"

he said, "don't they know that you don't

use thick paint for flying?" But the time was to come when another furious painting made at Cape Split would fetch a whale of a price at An American Place, many thousands of dollars, and after that the authorities were a little more generous in giving time and space to the showing of oils. Marin's public began to have a chance to review the paintings in which equilibrium went hand in hand with mobility: pictures of pink bathers; cold seascapes,-warm scenes from the circus. An attempt to do the oils justice was made when Stieglitz chose twentyone canvases to hang with more than two hundred water colors and etchings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The show was installed a couple of months before Marin's sixty-sixth birthday. But the balance was bad, the public resisted. Visitors seemed to want just one thing: the bright, sparkling paper. "All right," said Marin, "from now on they'll get oils." He was just as unlikely to abandon the transparent colors as to give up berry-picking and fishing. Water color was right for the quick recording of the swift revelation, and for the sixteen succeeding years at C a p e Split, Marin used the more fugitive medium to set down the true shape of things in the passing moment. But when he wanted to move on from nature's transilience to nature's continua— when he wanted to speak of the heights of experience from the depths of his being—he set up his easel in the pine woods that rimmed his meadow and strove with G o d in oil color. The years passed. Mrs. Marin died, the dear dove;

Stieglitz died, a loved friend. W i t h time out for solitary exploring and fishing, Marin's life became all paint and canvas. When An American Place bravely faced its closure with a retrospective showing of Marin oil paintings, there was not a water color in sight. And what wonderful things were revealed when the peopled world had receded! They were hieroglyphic and " r e a l , " impatient and sure, controlled and yet passionate. In 1950, Marin was eighty. Eighty years old and still climbing Maine mountains for new subject matter. Eighty years old and still painting the look of the moon above many-storied Manhattan. And always the vivid image evoked with economy. Marin had really stripped down, like a spiritual athlete. I shall always believe I was present when the dear man resolved to render his life back to nature. It was about ten days before he died at his summer home at Cape Split in October, 1953. He had been holding my hand with his good hand, his right hand—he was suffering from a partial paralysis—but when I began to speak of the paintings he had brought down to Maine from New Jersey, all of them absolute and ultimate Marins, he let go of my hand and reached under the bedclothes. He brought out his lame hand, the helpmeet left hand, and stroked it. Speech was hard for him and hearing not easy, yet one knew he was LOBSTER B O A T .

thinking that the manual partnership producing the pictures

O i l , 1940.

Mr. and Mrs. Laurance S. Rockefeller,

New York

was severed and could not be repaired. He was sharp enough, too, to know that the light of the body was being extinguished. " B u t think what it has meant, Mr. M a r i n , " I said, "think what it mounts up to to have been painting past eighty and getting better and better." He shook his head slowly. "Nurse,"

he said, after a

moment, "please bring us some whisky."

I thought: " M a r i n

has pursued his pictorial objects with total energy, up to now, and with remarkable singleness. Put together, his paintings will tell a great story. The work is all done. W h a t is there to wait for?" The nurse came in with the whisky. I tried to smile as I drank acquiescence.

BOAT A N D S E A — D E E R ISLE, M A I N E SERIES, No. 2 7 . Water color, 1927. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Dreyfuss, South Pasadena

You are opening this book because John Marin was a great artist. John Marin had a long life: two years a g o he was alive at eight-two; and so most of us who knew him knew him only in his old age. He had an eery frailty without being frail. His hair was dark, and he wore a mop of it cut in bangs; his wife, in her lifetime, used to cut it under a bowl. His chin and nose were long, his skin turned to fine, thin leather, flickering with wrinkles; his eyes were alert and friendly, with a touch-and-go defensiveness. He seemed to be looking out of his mask like some inquisitive animal—a chipmunk peering out of its weathered tree-stump. For the rest, he wore a full black tie in a large bow, as though a JOHN FRONT!

parent had dressed him for the party. But he never had a

M A R I N -

mother: she died at his birth.

ERSMAN

FREDERICK

S.

Marin had an instinct for frontiers. This was the driving

WIGHT

force which carried him deeper and deeper into the remoteness of N e w England, ever further down the coast, as far as it is still United States, until there was something greatly moving to see him here on this frontier of rock and sea, and on the final frontier of a lifetime. The landscape told something of the ingredients of immortality, as though it were only an easy step to take, one stone was here, the next there. But it was not all Daniel Boone-ing. Marin knew the frontier when he saw it, in the present and future as well as the past. He came back from Europe to discover that N e w York was a frontier; he understood that new ways of seeing were frontiers, and so were new ways of working. He knew too, like a frontiersman, that the world all about is an active impinging wilderness, he must respect it, be constantly aware of it, it is alive and must be dealt with. He must know well the elemental, the essential—rock, sea, tree, climate; or street, building, man, traffic. The frontiersman must live in an active tense, realizing that his world is active too. There is no active-passive in Marin: all is activeactive in a subtle adjustment of opposing forces and tensions. Always there is motion and counter-motion, so that whatever appears to be at rest is only resting—alert and alive. There is a Marin legend of a man spending half of eighty

years floundering until he found himself, and in so doing finding America. The story is not quite so simple. A great artist has his resources, his ways and means, the frontiers-

1929 On the desert surrounded by these huge things. Amidst Indians and Mexicans who have black eyed daughters.

man has weapons and tools that are not—could not be— of his own making. The artist acquires what he needs, has an instinct that acquires sophistication like marksmanship; he schools himself in his own way. That the etchings belong to the days before self-discovery is not the case. The etchings began with a Whistlerian fluid amorphousness, but they built up to the shock of breaking contact. The later etchings are jagged brittleness, the jar between force and rock. Marin's art rose in three waves, his etchings, his water colors and his oils—and it is not certain that the third wave is not the greatest. These waves overlap; before one breaks, the next is rising. There is a fourth wave too, of communication, writing and speaking; the man who could see and paint could also tell and write, and his gesturing hands could speak as well as paint. Marin's letters, his language, show the same cryptic fragmentation as his paint, phrases jostling together in some sort of equilibrium and tension, sharpening the listener's ear, making plain how much could not be told, must be lost out of any life, and the more acute the senses, the more lost. "Good

things start—good things finish—they

hesitate—they

start—too—they

don't carry

don't

on to a

something that weakens what is within when their edge is reached—the enough

story is

told—complete—satisfying—

said—"

It is the modern artist who reaches the limits of communication, and then can only sting the artist in us to life. W h o was the man? The facts have been well told. How the Marin side was French, with family knowledge that the name was originally Spanish. How the mother's side, the Currey side, had been American longer,- the Curreys were loyalists during the Revolution. Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, and when his mother died on his ninth day he was surrendered to two maiden aunts living at Weehawken. They reared him according to their lights, which may have been narrow but were sharp focussed,

1931 This Inland Sea can be quite a person—can kick up quite a rumpus—can be quite a few things that would surprise one into—a looking

STORM OVER TAOS. Alfred

Stieglitz

Coll.,

W a f e r color, 1930. National

Gallery

SPEED — LAKE CHAMPLAIN. Munson-Williams-Proctor

Institute,

of Art,

Washington,

D.C.

W a t e r color, 1931. Utica,

New

York

'aim

a n d he t o o k after their side o f the f a m i l y . A g r a n d f a t h e r C u r r e y in D e l a w a r e lent a h a n d . In N e w Jersey o r D e l a w a r e t h e r e w a s a certain a m o u n t of r o v i n g a n d sketching w h i c h hindsight n e e d n o t m a g n i f y . Except t h a t a p a t t e r n w a s set: the s o l i t a r y a w a r e n e s s , t h e a d o l e s c e n t lean f i g u r e , the l o o k a n d o u t l o o k , all this s t a y e d . W h a t is the d i f f e r e n c e b e t w e e n

vagabondage

a n d p i l g r i m a g e e x c e p t the s u d d e n k n o w l e d g e that m a n ' s g o a l is n o t a h e a d , but in the seeking? Public S c h o o l , the H o b o k e n A c a d e m y , the f o u r y e a r s o f Stevens P r e p a r a t o r y , a n d o n e y e a r o f Stevens Institute. O d d j o b s , then f o u r years in a n architect's o f f i c e a n d t w o as a f r e e - l a n c e a r c h i t e c t . M a r i n w a s miscast; y e t the f a c t o f b u i l d i n g a f e w houses, a n y houses t h a t s t a n d o n their f o u n d a t i o n s , is s o m e t h i n g s o l i d . M a r i n m e a n t his construct i o n , a n d he w a s t o b u i l d a n a r c h i t e c t u r e a t o n c e as c h a n c y a n d as r e l i a b l e as the tallest structural steel. The e a r l y exercise in the nature o f c a r p e n t r y s h o u l d n o t b e lost t o sight. N o w m o r e serious v a g a b o n d a g e : sketching much in the m o o d o f a b o y g o i n g fishing, scuffing a w a y the t w e n ties a n d seeing the c o u n t r y as far as the Mississippi. In 1 8 9 9 he e n r o l l e d a t the Pennsylvania A c a d e m y o f the Fine Arts in P h i l a d e l p h i a , a n d the f o l l o w i n g y e a r he even w o n a p r i z e . A l l this p r e - s u p p o s e d c o n t i n u i n g f a m i l y s u p p o r t . His father trusted f o r the b e s t — a n d lived t o see the best; but the f a m i l y m o o d in t h o s e d a y s w a s o f d e s p e r a t i o n . REGION B R O O K L Y N BRIDGE FANTASY. Whitney

M u s e u m o f American Art, New

York

W a f e r color,

1932.

The

Art

Students

League

followed

the

Pennsylvania

A c a d e m y . T h e n — t h e t w o m a i d e n ladies p e r s u a d i n g his f a t h e r , a n d d o u b t l e s s l o v i n g better t h a n t h e y u n d e r s t o o d — M a r i n w a s a l l o w e d t o t a k e his p r o b l e m s t o Paris. M a r i n ' s six y e a r s o f E u r o p e w e r e n o t as feckless as t h e y a p p e a r e d t o t h o s e a t h o m e . Rambling, p l a y i n g a g o o d g a m e o f billiards, M a r i n s o m e h o w missed w h a t w a s n e w in E u r o p e — h e w a s n o t r e a d y f o r it. H e m a y h a v e missed the museums t o o , but he s a w the w o r l d , he felt the d e p t h o f the scene. H e g o t a b o u t . There w e r e trips t o the L o w C o u n t r i e s , t o I t a l y — m o s t l y t o V e n i c e ; t o L o n d o n . These w e r e the years o f the e t c h i n g s — h e b e g a n w h e r e W h i s t l e r left o f f . There w a s a n outlet f o r these etchings a t the time. W h e n M a r i n w a s d i s c o v e r e d he w a s n o t u n k n o w n .

MACHIAS, MAINE. Water color, (945. Mr. John Marin, ir., Cliffside,

New

Jersey

Nevertheless there w a s a moment of sponsored metam o r p h o s i s . E d w a r d Steichen f a t e f u l l y met M a r i n a n d t o o k his w a t e r c o l o r s h o m e t o A m e r i c a t o s h o w t o his f e l l o w photographer

Alfred

Stieglitz.

The

future

impresario

e x h i b i t e d the w a t e r c o l o r s a t his Photo-Secession G a l l e r y , the f a m o u s 2 9 1 Fifth A v e n u e , in M a r c h , 1 9 0 9 . Stieglitz met M a r i n in Paris the f o l l o w i n g summer a n d p e r h a p s M a r i n felt the s i g n i f i c a n c e o f the o c c a s i o n . In D e c e m b e r he w a s b a c k in A m e r i c a , a n d in F e b r u a r y Stieglitz put o n the first M a r i n one-man s h o w at " 2 9 1 . " Here, also, w e r e to be seen, a t o n e time o r a n o t h e r , C é z a n n e , Picasso, M a t i s s e , Rousseau, P i c a b i a , B r a n c u s i — t h e T w e n t i e t h C e n t u r y as Stieglitz h a d distilled it. There w a s a s e c o n d t r i p t o E u r o p e in 1 9 1 0 . The next y e a r M a r i n w a s p a i n t i n g in the T y r o l , a n d in the masses o f the m o u n t a i n s the n e w c o n d e n s e d M a r i n b e g a n t o c o m e c l e a r . T h e r e is a sense o f p r o c e d u r e , o f o c c u p a t i o n f o u n d . A s if in search o f the subject matter w h i c h he n o w k n e w t h a t he n e e d e d , M a r i n c a m e h o m e f o r g o o d . S o m e t h i n g tense a n d brittle b e g a n t o h a p p e n ; structure, w h e r e all h a d b e e n fluid. If y o u h a v e w a t c h e d ice crystals s p e a r i n g o u t s u d d e n l y in w a t e r o v e r thin r o c k , this is w h a t h a p p e n e d t o M a r i n ' s a r t in the next ten y e a r s . It d i d n o t g o u n o b s e r v e d . From this time o n t h e r e is a Marin-Stieglitz story, legend a n d legend maker. M a r i n w a s a l o o f a n d Stieglitz n e e d e d a n a l o o f genius. Stieglitz, a genius himself, u n d e r s t o o d genius, k n e w h o w it g r o w s as a n e e d e d myth w h i c h it then i m p r o b a b l y substantiates. Stieglitz k n e w h o w t o m a n a g e the transitions f r o m s c a r c i t y t o rareness t o v a l u e . Perhaps this w a s t o o successfully d o n e in M a r i n ' s lifetime, so t h a t he b e c a m e f a m o u s for s o m e t h i n g w h e n he n e e d e d t o b e f a m o u s as s o m e t h i n g , a

man w h o

c a r r i e d greatness into all his means

of

expression. The rest o f M a r i n ' s life w a s living in C l i f f s i d e ,

New

Jersey in the w i n t e r , n o t t o o far f r o m the t e r r i t o r y he k n e w as a c h i l d , w h e r e he h a d a ringside v i e w o f the h a r b o r o f N e w Y o r k ; a n d in the summers he e x p l o r e d N e w E n g l a n d d e e p e r a n d d e e p e r . By the t i m e M a r i n d i s c o v e r e d M a i n e he h a d his life's m a t e r i a l : M a i n e w a s his q u a r r y . It h a p p e n e d g r a d u a l l y o f c o u r s e . In 1 9 1 2 M a r i n m a r r i e d

— i t was a marriage which had been waited f o r — a s though he at last believed that the chances could be hopefully taken. 1913 was the year of the Armory Show in which Marin was

duly

represented.

Summers—the

expansive seasons—saw Marin taking to the field, still at random: the Berkshires, the Adirondacks in 1912, Castorland, New York, the next year,- and finally Maine (West Point) in 1914. In 1915 he was at Small Point (out beyond Portland), a scene of more importance to him, his first serious Maine outpost. But there were still vacillations— he was at Echo Lake in Pennsylvania in 1916 ("Painting is like Golf,

the fewer the strokes I take, the better the pic-

ture," is the simile from that season). He was back at Small Point in 1917, but in the war year of 1918 he was bogged down in the woods at Rowe, Massachusetts, quite discouraged with his work and engulfed in the chores of poverty. Altogether the Maine of Small Point had only been a foretaste, the last of a nineteenth century experience, the stagnation of a summer hotel with its cottages within hailing distance like so many marriageable daughters. Marin needed something more remote. The W a r over, Marin crossed Penobscot Bay to Stonington on the ocean side of Deer Isle, got himself a powerboat and took to the amphibious life. Stonington sits uncomfortably on its rocks, facing its inlet and its islands, the transition from wharf to dwelling as intimate as from house to woodshed in upland New England. The comB O A T F A N T A S Y . DEER I S L E , M A I N E S E R I E S , No. 3 0 . Water color, 1928. Mr.

John

Marin,

Jr.,

Cliflside,

New

Jersey

munity is as restless as the sea off which it lives. Fog and rain take their turns, and then the protective fleet of islands emerges, in water blinding white under the midday sun. Out in the harbor is an island granite quarry, pronged with derricks and booms, its granite later lugged off to New York to become St. John the Divine—whether the rocks were not transformed by Marin more economically is matter for reflection. It is an effortful, uncompromising scene, which Marin accepted slowly, then joyously. He had his skill and technique in hand and he came of age as an artist. The death of his father occurred at this time, an event which promotes a man, and puts him on his mettle. This is a decade of no oils and great water c o l o r s — one can call names at random and not miss. There is the

incomparable M a i n e I s l a n d s of 1922, from the Phillips Gallery, for which M a r i n I s l a n d of 1915 was preparing

us. S u n , Isles and Sea and T w o M a s t e r Becalmed; Back o f Bear M o u n t a i n , 1 9 2 5 , P e r t a i n i n g t o S t o n i n g t o n H a r b o r of the next year, T h e S e a — a n d Pertaining

Thereto.

Over against these are equal

triumphs in painting New York, with its thrustings, splinterings and outcroppings as though man had taken a hand in geology: the great L o w e r M a n h a t t a n from the Philip L.

Goodwin Collection, L o w e r M a n h a t t a n f r o m the R i v e r , T h e Stock Exchange, Red S u n — B r o o k l y n B r i d g e , S t r e e t C r o s s i n g — N e w Y o r k , Region B r o o k l y n Bridge Fantasy, to pick only a few. W h a t Marin gives us he boils down to a phrase, and then he boils that phrase up to a headline. Marin is always intent on putting across a great piece of news. The first thing about Marin's style is that it has, it is a content. Here is what was, and still is, news from Stonington, which made him reach for a brush. "The

waves of the sea and the wind, the birds of the

sea are a soaring, wings, swiftly STREET CROSSING — Phillips

Gallery,

N E W YORK.

Washington,

D.C.

W a t e r color,

1928

the wild duck in flock are beating their

in flight up there aflying.

What right to fly?

Get me a gun. Bang, down one comes, poor broken thing that was just before a beautiful life. Hurry take out his entrails, him. Ah—very

up. Pluck him,

make quick the fire, cook him, eat

good eating is wild duck. Stop, stop, the

memory of what was once a bird up there aflying, the air with its "When

beating

wings—"

I was up to A/If. Desert (oh that's the place) . . .

we were racing home to get in ahead of the thunderstorm. We were passing a lake, with the black mountains and the black clouds. . . . Just then a big white-headed eagle was seen flying past, in no great hurry, just shouldering

his way

along, a part of it. Oh that's the boid for me." "I don't paint rocks, trees, houses, and all things seen, I paint an inner vision. Rubbish. If you have an intense love and feeling toward these things, you'll

try your damndest

to put on paper or canvas, that thing. You can transpose, you can play with and on your material, but when you are finished that's got to have the roots of that thing in it and no other thing. That's the trouble with all the lesser men.

COMPOSITION, CAPE SPLIT, No. 2. Oil, 1933. Mr. and Mrs.

Lawrence

Fleischman,

Détroit

And an inner vision of yours has got to be transposed your medium, a picture of that vision. Otherwise use, no excuse, for basically

there's no

you're not different from any

other living

thing, other than an intensity,

direction

vision."

of

onto

other

than

Modernness and Americanness It is clear that Marin must have a content and context, but what to do with it, how to handle it—for mere exuberance is not a receipt. There must be reflection, there must be a w a y between inner and outer glimmerings, there must be—as it happened—something learned from Europe, and something eternally remembered from before that. For modernness came from Europe, facing the American artist with learning without imitating—what was to be peculiar to himself? Well, the modern European artist was a philosopher of a most subjective stripe. He became his universe, and there are great rewards in such detachments: conceptions flourish, the subconscious mind suns itself in front of its cave. . . . Americans, too, have attempted detachment from the days of the Transcendentalists, but with us the thing out there is not so easily denied. Thoreau in the woods hears the axes and saws,- the American takes his conceptions to the patent office. If he goes in for cosmic geometry his line is tangent to the earth. Marin is speaking of Mondrian: "A man with a fine intellectual head who has some fine things to but—but the answer

is that in his stripping—he

pretty close to-—blank walls—he's to perpendiculars

say—but—

gotten the thing down

and horizontals—which

is

unassailable

for how can one criticize a perpendicular—how zontal—how

comes

a spotless garment—how

a hori-

a blank wall. You

reduce and reduce and reduce until you come to (reductioadabsurdum) you who know your Latin can correct this —he

has even neutralized

his color—doesn't

come pretty close to neutralizing

the man

himself—Curious,

—there's a man with an exceptionally

isn't it

fine

head—making

a series of fine uprights and horizontals—as

supports for

things to grow—Yet

nothing grows

thereon.

P E R T A I N I N G T O DEER ISLE — T H E H A R B O R . M A I N E S E R I E S , N o . Allred

Stieglitz

Coll.,

Metropolitan

1 . W a t e r color, 1 9 2 7 .

Museum

of Art,

New

York

LOBSTER B O A T , C A P E SPLIT, M A I N E . Oil, 1938. Mr. and Mrs. Lawrcnce

Fleischman,

Detroit

The other day I picked up Thoreau's

Walden—Well

he

goes to the woods where he could contemplate. I go to the woods because I love the woods. Each for

himself."

This is when Marin is seventy-five. Let us see what he has chosen for himself and brought out of the woods. " M o s t pictures are the copying of nature or (in so-called

abstract

work) they are the copying of mind seeings. If you copy a seen object or a mind object it

is—

wrong— Any object seen in nature or any object seen in the mind must be recreated to live with and on the surface it's to exist with and on to

be—right—

These drawings are made in an effort to put down the different Street & City movements as I feel them in such a way that what appears on the paper shall have a life of its own akin to the movements

felt—

There never was or never will be a non-objective

art."

This statement is an end product. It had far beginnings. In 1920 Marin was saying: "It's the open sight vision—that

a question as to whether

is of things you

see—isn't

better than the inner, I mean, vision things. That, I guess, is a muted unanswered

question.

claim not. Nevertheless,

But the Superiors

would

take today for example. I was

laying off in my boat, and there was a schooner full sail coming toward me. I made about 20

under

drawings,

none near perfect, but the sight as she loomed up, a thing of life changing with every second, I couldn't describe the wonder

of it. After writing

begin to

this, my answer

now, to myself, is that you cannot divorce the two, they are unseparable,

they go

together."

Generalize from this that Marin loves a double aspect, two-sidedness, subtle balances, resolved contradictions. Take his oft-quoted self-portrait: "Curiously

twisted

Prejudiced as Unprejudiced Narrow—as Broad-minded

creature.

Hell. as

Hell.

they make 'em. next minute.

Hating everything foreign, to a degree, with the opposite coming in, time and time.

A shouting spread-eagled A drooping,

wet-winged

American. sort of a nameless

fowl the

next." Antithetical language: "I am part of a small, world."

large

The sense of balance, of ambivalence, of equi-

librium, in Marin may have been related to his ambidextrousness: he painted with both hands. Anyhow it was there, ready to express itself in characteristic gestures. He would conjure with an intangible e d g e — " Y o u see it and you don't—you don't—"

see it and you don't—you

see it and you

like a conductor hushing an orchestra. But Marin

did not look like a musician, he looked like a musical instrument. Man and art were resonances and tensions. "Too,

it here comes to me with emphasis that all things

within the picture must have a chance. in their playground, playground

A chance

as the dancer should have a suitable

as a setting for the dance.

Too, it comes to me a something in which I am interested. I refer to Weight balances. a downward O N MORSE M O U N T A I N , SMALL POINT, MAINE. Water color, 1928. Mr. Philip L. Goodwin, New

York

to play

curiously

As my body exerts

pressure on the floor, the floor in turn exerts

an upward pressure on my

body.

Too, the pressure of the air against my body, my body against the air, all this I have to recognize the

when

building

picture."

One

of the subtleties in Marin is his small-big relation

to the monumental. "Seems to me the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the elemental Sky, Sea, Mountain,

Plain,—and

big

those things

thereto, to sort of re-true himself up, to recharge tery. For these big forms have everything.

forms— pertaining the bat-

But to express

these, you have to love these, to be a part of these in sympathy.

One doesn't get very far without this love, this

love to enfold too the relatively little things that grow on the mountain's don't

recognize

back. Which if you don't recognize, the mountain."

you

Yet the mountain that

Marin recognizes is rarely monumental. He is not imposed on by bulk, he prefers balance and law. He seems to know, as the geologists tell us, that the mountains are up there not because they are so heavy, but because they are so light; they are afloat. This instinct for relationship, for balanced forces, all too

often has produced a static art, a classic art of forces that are spent. By contrast, Marin is all dynamism, it is the balance of the wave, of the hanging cliff, of the surging skyscraper. There must always be directions which imply motion, in other words, life, which time and again when Marin comes to the conclusion of matter, is written love. "Shall

we consider the life of a great city as confined

simply to the people and animals on its streets and in its buildings? Are the buildings been told somewhere

themselves dead? We have

that a work of art is a thing alive.

You cannot create a work

of art unless the things you

behold respond to something within you. Therefore if these buildings move me they too must have life. Thus the whole city is alive; buildings, people, all are alive,- and the more they move me the more I feel them to be alive. It is this 'moving of me' that I try to express, so that I may recall the spell I have been under and behold the expression

of the different emotions that have been called

into being. How

am I to express what I feel so that its

expression will bring me back under the spells? Shall I copy facts

photographically?

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. Feelings are aroused which give the desire to express the reaction of these 'pull forces,'

those

ences which play with one another; great masses

influpulling

smaller masses, each subject in some degree to the other's power. In life all things come under the magnetic influence of other things,- the bigger assert

themselves strongly,

the

smaller not so much, but still they assert themselves, and though hidden they strive change their bent and While

to be seen and in so

direction.

these powers are at work pushing, pulling,

ways, downwards,

doing

side-

upwards, I can hear the sound of their

strife and there is great music being played. And so I try to express graphically doing. Within trolling

what a great city is

the frames there must be a balance, a con-

of these warring,

pushing, pulling

what I am trying to realize. But we are all

forces. This human."

is

The Special Language Marin had by now an alphabet of his own pictographs, marks which had a characteristic geometry, but were still recognizably like the thing they symbolized. Water was written, trees were wedges, he made a forest out of M s — his own initial comes into the composition frequently as in

Headed for Boston. Rake formations are rain out of a cloud, sunbeams become baroque sunbursts behind the altar, the sun can be black, burning through the paper for the intense contrast with mere white, or the sun can repeat itself as a schooner passes before it as in B o a t a n d S e a

— D e e r Isle. Marin intends to be read, and he will tell you in short order what he found so that you may find. W h a t he found is an essential aspect, a prime mover, so that if something is once seized everything else follows. He even found the label for his intention: Pertaining

to.

Marin uses the phrase repeatedly in his titles, trying to show what cannot otherwise be seen: lines in Marin are like rigging to harness the wind; the sail moves, but so does the whole weather against the sail. Since Marin deals with forces, brought into conflict and resolved, it is understandable that he works, predominantly, with straight lines—the force or stroke continuing until curbed or mastered. The overmastering straight line is, in the last analysis, the edge or frame, and often the Marin line hits the frame and returns, a sort of billiard WOMEN FORMS AND SEA. Oil, 1934. Estate

of John

Marin

shot. But Marin is on the side of the stroke, and does not willingly submit to the frame, he prefers a self-limitation within the picture, a stroke framing which both suits and defines the composition, making an island of it, afloat in space. Hexagonal or octagonal framing lines are characteristic—Marin resists the rectangular box as much as does Frank Lloyd Wright. The result is near to the physicist's world, really,- underneath the apparent color and form there is only a web of forces. There is very little mass or weight or gravity in Marin—the one heavy thing is the fluid weight of the sea. In place of the downdrag of gravity the painting is likely to have its own gravitational center in the heart of the composition, (island, boat or whatever) and often an

M O V E M E N T - S E A A N D S K Y . O i l , 1946. William

H. Lane Foundation,

Leominster,

Massachusetts

P E R T A I N I N G T O S T O N I N G T O N H A R B O R , M A I N E , No. 4 . Water color, 1926. Alfred

Stieglitz

Coll.,

Metropolitan

Museum

of Art,

New

York

arbitrary direction line plunges toward this pivot, drawing the eye to the target. This much geometry over-suggests calculation, but Marin was a most intuitive person, working at speed, brooding later on what he had done and so growing wiser. His paintings have a kaleidoscopic, shattered and shattering effect, as of glass broken. One can entertain the notion—perhaps childhood fantasy retained—that the image is in the window glass itself, each frame a picture, the image there. Marin, who is so insistent that the image is on the plane surface—quite literally broke through to the outer world—he breaks outdoors. Then the heavy lines are sash bars—the writer has felt this broken window effect in M a i n e I s l a n d s . Too, there is in the Dorothy Norman collection a painting of a window (the bars penciled) with a separate scene in each section—it gave a feeling of corroboration. In any case, Marin is able to assemble a painting out of more than one image as a window assembles a view in its panes, the art being here one of dominance and subordination. But this is not always the case—there are single pane and multipane Marins. Not to overload a figure of speech, some Marins are melodic, some are symphonic, and this language is not remote from Marin's thinking, for the man was musical, he played the piano, and he explained himself in musical terminology. His painting is an experience in time, and he expected one to understand it as such. There was a way in to the painting and he planned a voyage for the eye. Some aroused recollection, some subordinate adjacent view, are there to reinforce or complete the composition. These complexities of views and frames within frames serve to condense meaning—and in pictorial terms, to set a problem for solving, and so extend the experience. In such a painting as S p e e d — L a k e C h a m p l a i n the elapsed time of appreciation is real, and meant to be, not unrelated to the rapid elapsed time of execution. There is an interval not merely from artist's eye to hand, but from skillful hand to our eye. The action comes through to us: It is a sort of handball, from Marin to canvas to ourselves. Everything in Marin is

T H E F O G L I F T S . O i l , 1949. Downtown Gallery,

New

Yoik

a doing, a showing;

he will not a l l o w passivity; w e must

take part. W h e n Marin entered new territory he painted what he saw,- in familiar territory he painted what he k n e w — a s he himself has commented. The more he knew his subject, the less his painting literally resembled it. Thus he never exhausted his interest or ours. He did not wear out the soil, but he cultivated it, and there is a special experience, when one comes across Marin sites, as of something being different than it was before: made clear. Intuitively Marin does as the scientist does. Apparently the scientist produces something more and more complex until appearances are all but lost. But actually he is relating and simplifying: the w o r l d composes

under the action of the

mind. This is modern seeing, which must continue to produce a variant on itself. For the eye can repeat, but if the mind repeats it is no longer mind and all is over.

The W e i g h t o f P i g m e n t A change of scale is in the air. Perhaps it first manifests itself in a Western trip, t w o land voyages to N e w Mexico in the summers of nineteen twenty-nine and thirty. The t w o summers produced a hundred water colors; among them S t o r m o v e r T a o s . W h e n works of art reach a certain quality one does not compare them with other

works of art, and S t o r m O v e r Taos is one of these. The oils n o w begin to emerge, and one recalls that there always

have been Marin oils, from the beginning.

A painting of 1933, Cape Split, N o . 2 is one of the finest. Here w e have the n o w familiar compartmentation of the symphonic water colors together with a structural power which seems to demand the heavier medium. But soon Marin is doing simpler, more massive things, as though his oil paintings are to be the base to the water color treble. There are tumults and solemnities which recall Winslow Homer (one remembers T h e L a d l e of 1934, or

Sea A f t e r t h e H u r r i c a n e of 1938, or Lobster Boat, Cape Split of 1940, or M y Hell Raising Sea of

CIRCUS ELEPHANTS. Water color and gouache, 1941 Alfred Stieglitz

Coll.,

Art Instituie of

Chicago

1942

So that is why I say that to

duce one's best—one fortable

had better be com-

with all doors locked brightly—and

watchdog

to guard against the fanatics

world.

to

and the fire

aburning the

pro-

have

a

big of

1941).

These

are

splendid

things,

almost

sculptural

c o m p a r e d with the linear art still to come. This is not to suggest that the water colors are dying d o w n ; they never d o . But with the thirties one feels a shift; M a r i n , broadening his resources, comments on it at an early date. " A s to my doings—my and on paper—of realized

oil paint—of

recognition

stretched

of—of

canvas—as

makings—on

canvas

water paint—of

a quiet

a difference

a burden

bearer

between—of for to

grip and to hold and to bind its expressing a white

paper—of

hold—for

itself—of

to show—of

a quality

tenaciously

oil

paint—of

intrinsic—for

itself and its water

paint

to

talk.

There seems now to me a benefit found in the—in working

of these two—each—thereby

a

the

of a seeing of each

thereby." He w o u l d have it both ways,- a n d yet he gradually becomes an oil painter in primary interest, reaching for impact a n d p o w e r . Besides, oil is more tangible, more of the thing made. Four years later, in 1936, he is writing-. "There places

are a couple

of oil paintings—slowly

drying

the paint is on thick and as paint costs money

in the

thicker the paint the more you ought to get for the picture — o r the thicker the more's

the paint—the

the penalty."

more

wasted—therefore

It seems clear that the w o r k of

art is gaining in factualness, that M a r i n is more a w a r e of something solid, concretely there on the plane surface: paint. The oils, coming in general after the water

colors,

represent a later development, not only in M a r i n but in the general twentieth century language Marin is helping to form: there is a gradual shift in emphasis from the splinter of g e o m e t r y — a thin a r t — t o the plastic f l o w of the organic. " S o maybe I'll start painting—if wonder —and

I do—I

shouldn't

but what I'd paint Rocks—Sea—Sky—and I'll probably

use plenty

of paint—like

here said about baking beans—plenty pork—plenty

of

Earth

the feller up

of pork—plenty

of

pork—"

Yet no sooner is heavy paint l o a d e d on canvas, than the subtleties a n d transparencies of water c o l o r technique return. H o w c o u l d it have been o t h e r w i s e — w h y should M a r i n t h r o w a w a y the most precious of gifts. So paintings

M O V E M E N T — B O A T A N D SEA IN GREY. Mr.

and Mrs.

Joseph

Hirshhorn,

New

S P R I N G , N o . 1. O i l , 1953. Phillips

Gailery,

Washington,

D.C.

York

O i l , 1952.

occur on canvas which are all silver Maine mist, such as

Movement on the Road to Addison of 1946. And one of the finest, that splits the difference between solid paste and the intangible, is T h e Fog L i f t s of 1949—a painting that synthesizes all of Marin into oil. The abstract pattern of fog breaking away before a realistic landscape, like slabs of ice cut ready for the ice house—if anyone remembers such things—is an extraordinary tour de force. One cannot help seeing the broken glass again: now the plain surface of the canvas has got into the painting—like so many kites; the symbol of Marin's trade has become part of the image too. The paintings of the forties are geometric, or linear, or both. The first gives us an outline of sloping strata, as though a geologic fault were at that instant releasing its energy, the whole superimposed on city or sea, as in

New Y o r k at Night; Movement in Grey, Green a n d R e d ; or Seapiece, 1951. The second is a snarl of lines produced with paint out of a syringe, a tangled web in which one object-symbol (together with our interest) is caught buzzing: S e a Piece, M a i n e , again of 1951, is a superb example of this handwriting; this condensed eloquence. In this so-called organic trend, with its amorphous wave forms in arbitrary colors—its red seas; with its sting of bright splatters and dabs that needle the retina, Marin parallels all that is new and newest in his time: this is Marin not unrelated to the School of New York. Over the years the success of the Stieglitz presentation came to be taken for granted: show followed show at An American Place. Duncan Phillips had been one of the earliest collectors, one of the most enthusiastic supporters. E. M. Benson wrote JOHN

MARIN,

THE MAN

AND

HIS WORK, in 1935. The Museum of Modern Art gave Marin a one-man show in 1936. Marin kept out of the way of success, but it crept up on him as age creeps up on others. Fallow seasons, and months of furious production; an equilibrium of forces in this seeming frail figure, balanced by the energies of Stieglitz. But time had gone by and Marin felt the war, a spiritual burden, as he had felt the

M O V E M E N T I N GREY, GREEN A N D RED, No. 2. Oil, 1949. Dr.

and

Mrs.

Michael

Waiter,

Philadelphia

previous war. And then his son, John Marin Jr., was in the Pacific. The isolations of mortality which his biographer has told: Marin's wife dying in the Spring of 1 9 4 5 ; Alfred Stieglitz, at eighty-two, in the following summer. From now on Marin was a charge to his son, who became father to the man; and who looked out for Marin's interests. In 1 9 4 7 there was another museum presentation, at the Institute of Contemporary Art: mainly of those paintings which had entered the Stieglitz Collection. MacKinley Helm now wrote JOHN lent biography. LETTERS

Dorothy

MARIN,

the excel-

Norman edited the amazing

in 1949. Then Edith Halpert, of the Downtown

Gallery, took the place of Stieglitz. John Marin Jr. continued to care for his father; the two went from Cliffside to Cape Split and came back with an annual harvest of paintings. Even in these late years the color blazed, the paint loosened, the style changed and grew. Marin understood the element of time in art which makes for greatness. For the rhythm and swell of time in the world about us is different from the bounded ripple of time within. There is a tension between the two, once we are aware, and it is out of this tension that art can be made.

"The

wind

has changed.

Now

the west

wind

blows.

Just as I was getting used to the wind that was, I

have the wind that is."

Last "The Summer is a thing of the past—strange seem—all

summers I have known are things of the past

Autumn is here—Enjoy world—You

as it may

it—there's

are not to Enjoy—I

"I will insist on looking

much trouble in the

refuse—I

will

back on the good times I have

had—/ will insist on looking forward

to more good times

—to somehow having a little of the wherewithal! on again—up

Enjoy—"

to carry

here by the ocean next year—there

much to be gotten—by

more seeing, by more

is

knowing."

Whatever may be said of Stonington may be said more emphatically of Cape Split: it is further, lonelier, the impact of sea and rock is louder, the tides are great, the

S E A P I E C E . O i l , 1951. Mr.

and Mrs.

John S. Schulte,

New

York

ledges omnipresent, the sea is only a friend to his familiars. The people who live by this sea-land have to know what they deal with, just as the artist has to know—no one lives by impressionism. If you are to reward the eye you must know how to navigate. Yet for all that, the sea is populous: lobster buoys bob in sight of each other for miles, powerboats furrow neatly between ledges in the clear or in the fog. O n e remembers coming in here by sail, closehauled at dusk, a Marin sunset over Mt. Desert to the west, full moon coming through clouds to the east, and down from the indefinite woodland the smell of a forest fire on the cold wind. The rock islands (the Ladle among them) carefully sought, at last disclose themselves and are recognized out of Marin paintings, although never seen before. The paintings being better known than the places, yet both are real and somehow each a different reality because the other exists. In N e w England there is a restless tension which incites to activity, not unlike the fervor of artistic creation. Do not think the seagull is sightseeing: he is about his survival. Man too is successfully about his survival as whatever he may be, and what with the courage, tension and chill, life seems to go on forever, until a twang, a shock, a chord is loosed. This is only mentioned because a man may have the fortune to know his own conclusion, to be in the presence of it and comment upon it. Marin suffered a shock, recovered, and was confronted with the spectacle of a hand not what it was. He took stock of his situation as Helm has described. His close friend Edith Halpert saw him, rallied him, and got him back on his feet. But he understood the cajolery with which women put heart into men. "Eighty-three

years is a long time," he said. "I have

had a long life and a very happy

one. Retained all my

faculties and want to go with them. Why

stay?"

There was a young painter present and Marin was urged into the diversion of criticism. "Well, you have enough here for ten paintings. W h e n I paint a thing I put

S E A PIECE. W a t e r color, 1951. M r s . William

M . W e a v e r , Jr.

in other things, sure, but only to set it off, to make it c o m e forward.—Be.—How

do

y o u feel a b o u t the evening

star? D o y o u like it? Just that one star? I love the evening star a n d bring it close."

" P . S . The Hurricane

has just hit—The

—Magnificent—Tremendous—God have yet the vision to see these

Seas are be

things."

praised

Glorious that

I

1940

The

shore—that

wave

a-breaking

on

the

starts something in the artist—

makes for him to hum—that's

the

story—

it's for the artist to make paint wave a breaking on paint shore

M Y HELL RAISING SEA. O i l , 1941. Mr. and M r s . David Levy, New York

N E W Y O R K A T N I G H T , N o . 3 . O i l , 1950. Mr. one/ Mrs. A/on H. Rosenthal,

New

York

1870

Born, Rutherford, N e w J e r s e y , December 23. Reared at Weehawken, N e w J e r s e y . Education: public school, Hoboken Academy, Stevens Preparat o r y , Stevens Institute (one y e a r ) . W o r k e d four y e a r s in architect's office.

1893

Freelance architect.

1 8 9 9 - Studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine A r t s in Philadelphia. 1 9 0 1 W o n p r i z e ( 1 9 0 0 ) for Weehawken sketches. 1904

CHRONOLOGY EXHIBITIONS

AND

Studied briefly at A r t Student's League, N e w Y o r k .

1905

(Summer) W e n t to E u r o p e ; located in P a r i s . Influenced by W h i s t l e r .

1906

T r i p to Amsterdam and Belgian Coast.

1907

T r i p to I t a l y ; saw Rome, Florence, spent s i x weeks in Venice.

1908

T r i p s to London, Amsterdam, Bruges, Antwerp, B r u s s e l s . The Mills of Meaux, 1906, purchased for Luxembourg Museum. Exhibited in Autumn S a l o n . Louis Katz sold his etchings.

1909

Exhibited oil paintings in Independents. Met Edward Steichen who showed his paintings to A l f r e d S t i e g l i t z .

1909

( M a r c h ) S t i e g l i t z first exhibited water colors at Photo-Secession " 2 9 1 " Fifth Avenue — M a r i n returned to America (December).

1910

" 2 9 1 " Fifth Avenue ( F e b r u a r y ) . F i r s t one man show.

Gallery,

1910

Returned to Europe in S p r i n g . Painted in T y r o l .

1911

Returned to America permanently ( M a y ) . Ten water colors, left behind, exhibited Autumn S a l o n . Summer in Egremont Plains, B e r k s h i r e s .

1912

Summer in B e r k s h i r e s and Adirondacks.

Married.

1 9 1 3 - Removes: Lived in Brooklyn, then N e w Y o r k , then permanently in C l i f f s i d e , 1 9 5 3 N e w J e r s e y , from 1916 to 1953. S u m m e r s : Castorland, N e w Y o r k , 1913; W e s t Point, M a i n e , 1914; Small Point, M a i n e , 1915; Echo Lake, Pennsylvania, 1916; Small Point, 1 9 1 7 ; Rowe, Massachusetts, 1918; Stonington, Deer I s l e , M a i n e , and Small Point, 1 9 1 9 ; Stonington, 1920-24; C l i f f s i d e , 1925; Chocorua, N e w H a m p s h i r e , Stonington and Small Point, 1926; W h i t e Mountains, Lake Champlain, Small Point, 1927; Small Point, Stonington, and Lake George, N e w Y o r k , 1928; T a o s and Santa Fe, N e w Mexico, 1929-30; Small Point, 1931; Cape S p l i t , A d d i s o n , M a i n e , 1933-1953.

1953

Died, Cape S p l i t , M a i n e , October 1.

Awards American Institute of A r t s and Letters -

1945 (made member)

American Institute of Architects — 1948 Philadelphia W a t e r c o l o r Club (Pa. Academy of the Fine A r t s ) -

1949

Metropolitan Museum of A r t — 1952 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine A r t s — Temple G o l d M e d a l — 1954 (posthumously)

Degrees Doctor of Fine A r t s , Y a l e U n i v e r s i t y - June, 1950 Doctor of Fine A r t s , U n i v e r s i t y of M a i n e — July, 1950

One-Man Exhibitions

Photo-Secession G a l l e r y , " 2 9 r ' Fifth Ave., N e w Y o r k : 1909, 1910, 1913, 1915 D a n i e l s G a l l e r y , N e w Y o r k : Retrospective, 1920 Brooklyn Museum : 1922 M o n t r o s s G a l l e r y , N e w Y o r k : 1922, 1924 Intimate G a l l e r y , N e w Y o r k : 1925, 1928 An American Place, N e w Y o r k : 1929, 1930, 1931, 1932, 1933, 1934, 1935, 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1946, 1947, 1948, 1949, 1950 T h e Downtown G a l l e r y , N e w Y o r k : 1939 (with An American Place), 1948, 1950, 1951, 1952, 1953, 1954 Museum of M o d e r n A r t , N e w Y o r k : John M a r i n Retrospective, 1936 " Cleveland Museum of A r t ; ( E a r l y Etchings), 1939 Institute of Contemporary A r t , Boston : 1947 P h i l l i p s G a l l e r y , W a s h i n g t o n , D.C. : 1947 W a l k e r Art Center, M i n n e a p o l i s : 1947 Same Retrospective

Exhibition

in oil three Museums in order

M . H . de Young Memorial Museum, San F r a n c i s c o :

listed

1949

Santa B a r b a r a Museum of A r t : 1949 Los Angeles County Museum : 1949 Same Retrospective

Exhibition

in all three Museums

in order

Venice Biennale : 1950 N e w Jersey State Museum, Trenton : Retrospective, 1950

listed

THE

Downtown

^ •••

LADLE.

Oil,

1934.

Gallery,

New

York

V

SEAGULLS. M r s . Edith

Gregor

W a t e r color,

Hal pert,

New

1936.

York

Art Gallery — University of Miami : Retrospective, 1951 Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, N e w York: Retrospective, 1951 American Federation of Arts: Etchings (Retrospective Group) Travelling Exhibition, 1952-1954 * Stanford Research Institute, Palo Alto, Calif. : "Etchings of New York," 1953 * Evansville, Illinois, Public Museum — Watercolors from The Howald Collection — Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts and The Downtown G a l l e r y : 1953 Museum of Fine Arts: Houston, Texas: Retrospective, 1953 American Academy of Arts and Letters, N e w York: Retrospective, 1954 * Museum of Modern Art, New York: From collections of Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1954 * Art Institute of Chicago ; From collection of Art Institute of Chicago, 1954 Detroit Institute of Arts: Retrospective, 1954 * Yale University

:

1954

Philadelphia Art Alliance: Retrospective, 1954 * Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California: 1954 * denotes small exhibitions P a i n t i n g s in P u b l i c C o l l e c t i o n s Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Mass. Alabama Polytechnic Institute, Auburn, Ala. Baltimore Museum of Art Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfìeld Hills, Michigan Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana Albright Art G a l l e r y , Buffalo Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass. Art Institute of Chicago Encyclopaedia Britannica, Chicago Cleveland Museum of Art Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts Des Moines Art Center Detroit Institute of Arts Washington Co. Museum of Art, Hagerstown, Maryland Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Conn. Museum of Fine Arts, Houston John Herron Art Institute, Indianapolis Lane Foundation, Leominster, Mass. University of Nebraska, Lincoln Randolph Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg, Virginia Fiske University, Memphis The Miller Company, Meriden, Conn. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Newark Museum Association Brooklyn Museum of Art I.B.M. Corporation, N e w York Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Museum of Modern Art, N e w York Whitney Museum of American Art, N e w York Museum of Art of Ogunquit, Ogunquit, Maine Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia Philadelphia Museum of Art Rochester Memorial Art Gallery Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California Springfield Art Museum, Springfield, Missouri City Art Museum, St. Louis Arizona State College, Tempe, Arizona Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, N e w York National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C. Phillips Gallery, Washington, D. C. Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass. Norton Gallery, West Palm Beach, Florida Roland P. Murdock Collection, Wichita Art Museum, Kansas Delaware Art Center, Wilmington, Delaware Butler Art Institute, Youngstown, Ohio

MACHIAS, MAINE. Oil, 1952. Private

1931

Collection

Outdoor

painting as such is just

seemingly bear no relationship

to the room

a J o b — t o get down what's ahead of you —water

you paint the way water moves

In

—Rocks

and soil you paint the way they

should

were worked

for their

formation—Trees

indoors painting — as such — bear a close

relationship

things to the

room

you paint the way trees grow And I find that now I am hovering close to If you are more or less successful

these

paintings will look pretty well indoors

for

a statement that in using the term indoors I am approaching a supposition

they have a certain rugged strength which

traveling

will carry them off in a room—though

haunches again

they

which throws

of inward

us back on

our

DRAWINGS 1. ATLANTIC SERIES, 1905. Pen and ink, 13V4 x 11 y2. Coll.: Mr. John Marin, Jr., Cliff side, New

Jersey.

2. NEW YORK, 1932 (4 sketches). Pencil, 43/4 x 33/4. Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New

3. NEW YORK DOWNTOWN, No. 7, 1936. Ink, pen and wash, 26x20. Coll.: Walker

Art Center,

York.

Minneapolis.

4. THE SEA No. 1, 1941. Pencil, 11 xl3'/2. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery, New

York.

ETCHINGS 1. DELLA FAVA-VENICE, 1907. 9 % x 6 % . 2. NOTRE DAME, PARIS, 1908. 12'/2xl05/8. 3. BROOKLYN BRIDGE, 1913. 11^x8 3 A. 4. BROOKLYN BRIDGE, 1913. 7 x 8 % . 5. WOOLWORTH BUILDING, NEW YORK, No. 3, 1913. 12^8x10%. 6. GRAIN ELEVATORS, WEEHAWKEN, 1915. llKsx9. 7. D O W N T O W N NEW YORK, 1921. 7 x 8 % . 8. D O W N T O W N NEW YORK, 1925. 9 % x 7 % . 9. RIVER MOVEMENT, 1925. 7 % x 9 % . WATER COLORS 1. LONDON OMNIBUS, 1908. 11% x 15X6. Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum of Art.

Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum of Art.

2. MOVEMENT, SEINE, PARIS (FOUR O'CLOCK O N THE SEINE), 1909. 13V 4 xl6.

CATALOGUE

3. NEW YORK FROM THE EAST RIVER, 1910. 133/4xl63/4. Co II.: Dr. and Mrs. MacKinley Helm, Brookline, Massachusetts. 4. RIVER MOVEMENT-DOWNTOWN, 1910. 14xl7y 4 . Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence Fleischman, Detroit.

5. BROOKLYN BRIDGE, 1910. 18y 2 xl5'/ 2 . Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum of Art.

6. THE MOUNTAIN TYROL, 1910. 18'/ 4 xl5y 2 . Coll.: Estate of John

Marin.

7. MOVEMENT, FIFTH AVENUE, 1912. 165/8xl3y2. Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Art Institute of

Chicago.

8. WOOLWORTH BUILDING, No. 31, 1912. 19y 2 xl6. Coll.: Mrs. Eugene Meyer, Washington,

D.C.

9. DELAWARE COUNTRY, PENNSYLVANIA, 1916. 16x19%. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

10. GREY SEA, 1917. 23x26y 4 . Coll.: Ferdinand

Howald, Columbus

Gallery of Fine Arts.

11. REGION —ROWE, MASSACHUSETTS, 1918. 213/4x26y2. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

12. LOWER MANHATTAN, 1920. 21 7/8 x267/8. Coll.: Mr. Philip L. Goodwin,

New

York.

13. TREE, ROCKS AND SCHOONER, 1921. 16x19. Coll.: Castleton China, Inc.

14. SUN, ISLES AND SEA, 1921. 16y 2 xl9. Coll.: Edward

Gallagher,

Baltimore Museum of Art.

15. LOWER MANHATTAN FROM THE RIVER, No. 1, 1921. 21 y2 x26'/2. Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan

16. SUNSET, 1922. 173/4x22y4.

Museum of Art.

Coll.: Mrs. Edith Gregor Halpert, New

York.

17. OFF YORK ISLAND, MAINE, 1922. 17x20y 2 . Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Philadelphia

18. MAINE ISLANDS, 1922. 163/4x20.

Museum of Art.

Coll.: Phillips Gallery, Washington,

D.C.

19. RED SUN-BROOKLYN BRIDGE, 1922. 21^x26%. Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Art Institute of

Chicago.

20. TWO MASTER BECALMED, MAINE, 1923. 16y 2 xl9y 2 . Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum of Art.

BOATS, SEA A N D ROCKS. Oil, 1943 Estate of John

Marin

21. STONINGTON, MAINE, 1923. 16'/2x19y2. Coll.: Mr. John Marin,

Jr.

22. GREY SEA, 1924. 16y2x20V2. Coll.: Phillips

Gallery.

23. BAR HARBOR, MAINE, 1924. 18y4x22y2. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

24. THE LITTLE SAILBOAT, 1924. 17'/2x21'/2. Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. Robert Straus,

Houston.

25. STOCK EXCHANGE, NEW YORK CITY, 1924. 21 y2 x 18. Coll.: Mr. David

Solinger,

New

York.

26. HEADED FOR BOSTON, 1925. 175/8 x203/4. Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Art Institute of

Chicago.

27. EASTERN BOULEVARD, WEEHAWKEN, NEW JERSEY, 1925. 20% xl6'/ 4 . Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum

28. BACK OF BEAR MOUNTAIN, 1925. 17x20. Coll.: Phillips

of Art.

Gallery.

29. MOVEMENT No. 1, RELATED TO D O W N T O W N NEW YORK, 1926. 17y2x22y4. Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum

of Art.

Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum

of Art.

30. MOVEMENT No. 2, RELATED TO D O W N T O W N NEW YORK (BLACK SUN), 1926. 22x27. 31. PERTAINING TO STONINGTON HARBOR, MAINE, No. 4, 1926. 155/a x 213/4. CoII.: Alfred

Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum

of Art.

Coll.: Alfred

Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum

of Art.

32. PERTAINING TO DEER ISLE-THE HARBOR. DEER ISLE, MAINE SERIES, No. 1, 1927. 163/4 x22'/4. 33. WHITE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY, DIXVILLE NOTCH, No. 1, 1927. 18x22y2. Coll.: Mrs. Dorothy

Norman,

New

York.

34. BOAT AND SEA-DEER ISLE, MAINE SERIES, No. 27, 1927. 13% x 18. Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. Henry

Dreyfuss,

South

Pasadena.

35. WHITE MOUNTAIN COUNTRY, 1927. 17x21%. Coll.: Hinman

B. Hurlbut, Cleveland

Museum

of Art.

36. WHITE MOUNTAINS, AUTUMN, 1927. 19%x24. Coll.: Alfred

Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum

of Art.

37. THE SEA AND PERTAINING THERETO. DEER ISLE, MAINE SERIES, No. 15, 1927. 14x17%. Coll.: Alfred

Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum

of Art.

38. MID-TOWN CONSTRUCTION, 1928. 21%x26. Coll.: Santa

Barbara

Museum

of Art.

39. STREET CROSSING-NEW YORK, 1928. 26y4x213/4. Coll.: Phillips

Gallery.

40. BOAT FANTASY. DEER ISLE, MAINE SERIES, No. 30, 1928. 173/4 x 23. Coll.: Mr. John Marin,

Jr.

41. O N MORSE MOUNTAIN, SMALL POINT, MAINE, 1928. 21 xl6y 2 . Coll.: Mr. Philip L.

Goodwin.

42. O N MORSE MOUNTAIN, No. 6, MAINE, 1928. 16'/2x22. Coll.: Estate of John

Marin.

43. A SOUTHWESTER, 1928. 17y 4 x22y 2 . Coll.: Mr. John Marin,

Jr.

44. BROADWAY, NIGHT, 1929. 213/8x26y2. Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum

of Art.

45. NEAR TAOS, NEW MEXICO, No. 4, 1929. 14x20. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

46. BIG TREE-NEW MEXICO, 1929. 21 xl5. Coll.: Estate of John

Marin.

47. CORN DANCE, NEW MEXICO, 1929. 2 i y 2 x 2 8 % . Coll.: Alfred

Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum

48. STORM OVER TAOS, 1930. 167/8 x213/4. Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, National

Gallery

of Art.

of Art, Washington,

D.C.

OFF THE C A P E , C A P E S P L I T , M A I N E . Water color, 1952. Downtown Gallery, New York

S E A W I T H B O A T I N G R E Y , G R E E N A N D RED. Oli, 1948. John Mann, Jr.t Cliffside,

New

Jersey

»ie>h/f>

B O A T S A N D SEA. Water color, 1946. Downtown

Gallery,

New

York

4.C

49. SPEED-LAKE CHAMPLAIN, 1931. 16x21. Coll.:

Munson-Williams-Proctor

Institute,

Utica.

50. PHIPPSBURG, MAINE, 1932. 15y 4 xl9y 2 . Coll.:

Alfred

Stieglitz,

Metropolitan

Museum of

Coll.:

Albright

Art Gallery,

Coll.:

Whitney

Museum of American

Coll.:

Mr. John Marin,

Coll.:

Alfred

Coll.:

Downtown

Coll.:

Mrs. Edith Gregor

Coll.:

Mr. and Mrs. Milton

Art.

51. CITY CONSTRUCTION, 1932. 26x2iy 4 . Buffalo.

52. REGION BROOKLYN BRIDGE FANTASY, 1932. 183/4x22y2. Art, New

York.

53. DEEP SEA TRAWLERS, MAINE, No. 1, 1932. 15y2x213/4. Jr.

54. YOUNG MAN OF THE SEA, MAINE SERIES, No. 10, 1934. 15% x 20'/2. Stieglitz,

Metropolitan

Museum of Art.

55. GREEN MARINE WITH BOATS, 1935. 15y2x20y8. 56. SEAGULLS, 1936.

Gallery. Halpert.

57. MOVEMENT-NASSAU STREET, No. 2, 1936. 265/8 x205/8. Lowenthal,

New

York.

58. CIRCUS ELEPHANTS, 1941. Water color and gouache. 19*6x24%. Coll.:

Alfred

Stieglitz,

Coll.:

Downtown

Art Institute

of Chicago.

59. COAL COUNTRY, WILKES-BARRE, PENNSYLVANIA, 1942. 15x19%. Gallery.

60. MACHIAS, MAINE, 1945. 15y 4 x20%. Coll.: Mr. John Marin,

Jr.

61. BOATS AND SEA, 1946. 14 3 / 4 xl9. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

Coll.:

Downtown

Gallery.

Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

Coll.:

Art

62. PEACH TREES IN BLOSSOM, No. 1, 1948. 153/4 x 19. 63. FROM CAPE SPLIT, No. 2, 1948. 15y4x20y2. 64. PEACH ORCHARD IN BLOOM, No. 1, 1949. 143/4x20y2. Des Moines

Center.

65. TONK MOUNTAINS SERIES, No. 3, 1949. 15x20y2. Coll.:

Downtown

Coll.:

Mr. Nathaniel

Gallery.

66. MOVEMENT, SEA WITH FIGURES, 1950. 23y 2 x29. Saltonstall,

Boston.

67. SEA PIECE-MAINE, 1951. 14x20. Coll.: Mrs.

William

M. Weaver,

Jr., Blue Bell,

Pennsylvania.

68. OFF THE CAPE, CAPE SPLIT, MAINE, 1952. 14x19. Coll.:

Downtown

Gallery.

Coll.:

Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Hirshhorn,

69. THE TEMPEST, 1952. 14xl9y 2 . New

York.

OILS 1. WEEHAWKEN SEQUENCE-FOUR PAINTINGS, 1903. 9x6. Coll.:

Downtown

Gallery.

2. BRYANT SQUARE, 1932. 2iy 2 x26y 2 . Coll.: Phillips

Gallery.

3. LOOKING UP FIFTH AVENUE FROM 30TH STREET, 1932. 27 x 22. Coll.: Mr. John Marin,

Jr.

4. COMPOSITION, CAPE SPLIT, No. 2, 1933. 22x28. Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence

Fleischman.

5. STUDY-NEW YORK, 1934. 22x28. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

6. WOMEN FORMS AND SEA, 1934. 22x28. Coll.: Estate of John

Marin.

7. THE LADLE, 1934. 22x28. Coll.:

Downtown

Gallery.

8. CIRCUS HORSES, 1936. 26x32. Coll.:

Alfred

Stieglitz,

Metropolitan

Museum

of

Art.

9. SEA AFTER HURRICANE-CAPE SPLIT, MAINE, 1938. 23x30. Coll.: San Francisco Museum of Art.

10. LOBSTER BOAT, CAPE SPLIT, MAINE, 1938. 22x28. Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence

Fleischman.

11. LOBSTER BOAT, 1940. 22'/2x28. Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. Laurance S. Rockefeller, New

York.

12. MY HELL RAISING SEA, 1941. 23x29.

Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. David M. Levy, New

York.

13. SEA A N D GULLS, 1942. 25x30. Coll.: Alfred Stieglitz, Metropolitan

Museum of Art.

14. BOATS, SEA A N D ROCKS, 1943. 25x30. Coll.: Estate of John

Marin.

15. SEASCAPE FANTASY-MAINE, 1944. 25x30. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

16. SUZEY THOMPSON, 1945. 30x25. Coll.: Estate of John

Marin.

17. MOVEMENT-SEA A N D SKY, 1946. 22x28. Coll.: William

H. Lane Foundation,

Leominster,

Massachusetts.

18. M O V E M E N T - O N THE ROAD TO ADDISON, No. 3, 1946. 23 x 28. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

19. MOVEMENT-WIND-SOUTHWEST, 1947. 22x28. Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. E. R. Bahan, Fort Worth.

20. MOVEMENT-SEA-ULTRAMARINE A N D GREEN S K Y CERULEAN A N D GREY, 1947. 22x28. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

21. MOVEMENT-SEA OR MOUNTAIN —AS YOU WILL, 1947. 30x37. 22. THE LOBSTER FISHERMAN, 1948. 28 x 22. Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. Joseph

Hirshhorn.

23. TONK MOUNTAINS, MAINE, 1948. 25x30. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

24. SEA WITH BOAT IN GREY, GREEN AND RED, 1948. 24x30. Coll.: Mr John Marin, Jr.

25. TREES IN AUTUMN FOLIAGE, MAINE, 1948. 22x28. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

26. LAUREL BLOSSOMS, 1949. 23x27'/2. 27. MOVEMENT IN GREY, GREEN A N D RED, No. 2, 1949. 22x28. Coll.: Dr. and Mrs. Michael

Watter,

Philadelphia.

28. THE FOG LIFTS, 1949. 22x28. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

29. FULL M O O N OVER THE CITY, VERSION 2, 1949. 22x28. 30. NEW YORK AT NIGHT, No. 3, 1950. 18x22. Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. Alan H. Rosenthal, New

York.

31. MOVEMENT IN WHITE, UMBER AND COBALT GREEN, 1950. 241/, x 29y3. Coll.: Mr. Philip L.

Goodwin.

32. SEA PIECE, No. 1, 1951. 25x30. Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. John S. Schulte, New

York.

33. SEA PIECE, No. 2, 1951. 22x28. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

34. SEA PIECE, No. 3, 1951. 22x28. 35. MOVEMENT-BOAT AND SEA IN GREY, 1952. 28x22. Coll.: Mr. and Mrs. Joseph

Hirshhorn.

36. THE WRITTEN SEA, 1952. 22x28. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

37. MACHIAS, MAINE, 1952. 22x28. Private

Collection.

38. THE CIRCUS, No. 2, 1952. 22x28. Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

Coll.: Downtown

Gallery.

39. MOVEMENT-GREY A N D BLUE, 1952. 22x28. 40. SPRING, No. 1, 1953. 22x28. Coll.: Phillips

Gallery.

SUN,

Edward

ISLES A N D

Gallagher

S E A . W a t e r color,

C o / / . , Baltimore

Museum

1921.

of

Art

»IM « f c ®

SEA A N D Allred

jScfe•

.¿grjjf

G U L L S . O i l , 1942.

Stieglitz

Coll.,

The Metropolitan

Museum of Art, New York Books: E. M . Benson, John Marin, f/ie Man and his Work. can Federation of A r t s , 1935.

Washington, D . C . , The Ameri-

John M a r i n , Letters of John Marin, edited and with an introduction by H . J. Seligmann. N e w York, privately printed for An American Place, 1931. (Contains the article "John Marin on Himself," which first appeared in Creative Art, October 1928.) MacKinley Helm, Jo/in M a r i n . N e w York, Pellegrini & Cudahy in association with The Institute of Contemporary A r t , Boston, 1948.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

John M a r i n , The Selected Writings of John Marin, edited and with an Introduction by Dorothy Norman. N e w York, Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1949. Marsden H a r t l e y , pp. 96-101.

Adventures

in

the Arts.

A. E. Gallatin, American Water-Coiorists.

N e w York,

Boni & Liveright,

1921.

N e w York, E. P. Dutton, 1922.

E. A. Jewell, Americans. N e w York, Alfred Knopf, 1930. p. 34. Ralph Flint, John M a r i n , American Art Portfolios. Inc., 1936.

N e w York, Raymond & Raymond,

Paul Rosenfeld, Port of New York: Essays on Fourteen York, Harcourt Brace & Co., Inc., 1924. pp. 153-166. Duncan Phillips, A Collection Phillips G a l l e r y , 1926. p. 59.

in the Making.

Samuel M . Kootz, Modern American pp. 45-47.

Painters.

American

Modems.

New

N e w York, E. W e y h e ; Washington, N e w York, Brewer & W a r r e n , 1930.

Frederick S . W i g h t : Mi/esfones of American Painting in our Century, with an introduction by Lloyd Goodrich. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 1949. pp. 56-57. Lewis Hind, Art and I, London, John Lane, 1921. p. 178. Fiske Kimball and Lionello Venturi, Great Coward-McCann, Inc., 1948. pp. 216-217.

Paintings

in

America.

New

York,

Catalogues: John Marin: Watercolors, oil paintings, etchings, with preface by A l f r e d H . B a r r , J r . , e s s a y s by H e n r y M c B r i d e , M a r s d e n H a r t l e y , E. M . Benson. N e w York, Museum of M o d e r n A r t , 1936. John Marin a retrospective exhibition, with foreword by James S . Plaut, e s s a y s by M a c K i n l e y Helm and Frederick S . W i g h t , Boston, Institute of Contemporary A r t , 1947.

Articles: C. A. Caffin; M a u r e r s and M a r i n s in the Photo-Secession G a l l e r y , Camera W o r k , July 1909, p. 41. H . J. Seligmann, American W a t e r December, 1921, pp. 159-160.

Colors

Ernest H a s k e l l , John M a r i n , The Arts,

January, 1922.

Raul S t r a n d , John M a r i n , Art

Review,

Guy Eglington, " J o h n M a r i n , C o l o r i s t Decoration, Aug. 1924, pp. 13-14. The New

Republic,

in

Brooklyn,

International

Studio,

January 22, 1922; M a r i n not an Escapist, and Painter

of Sea M o o d s , "

Arts

and

July 25, 1928. pp. 154-155.

V i r g i l B a r k e r , The W a t e r C o l o r s of John M a r i n , The Arts, February, 1924, pp. 65-84; John M a r i n , A r t and Understanding, November, 1929, pp. 106-109. Lewis Mumford, M a r i n and Brancusi, The New 112-113.

Republic,

December 15, 1926, pp.

W a l d o Frank, The American A r t of John M a r i n , McCall's H e n r y M c B r i d e , M o d e r n Art, Julius M e i e r - G r a e f e , ber, 1928.

The Dial,

Magazine,

June, 1927.

February, 1929. pp. 174-175.

A Few Conclusions on American A r t , Vanity

Fair,

Novem-

Paul Rosenfeld, M a r i n Show, The New Republic, February 26, 1930, pp. 48-50; Essay on M a r i n , The Nation, January 27, 1932, pp. 122-124; M a r i n ' s C a r e e r , N e w Republic, A p r i l 14, 1937, pp. 289-292. Lloyd G o o d r i c h , " E x h i b i t i o n of W a t e r c o l o r s , S t i e g l i t z G a l l e r y , " 1930, pp. 120-121.

The Arts,

Nov.

" T h e American S c e n e , " The American Magazine of Art, Feb. 1934, pp. 57-58. Thomas Craven " J o h n M a r i n " Shadowland, Oct. 1 9 2 1 ; " J o h n M a r i n " The N a t i o n , M a r . 19, 1924, p. 321. Mathew Josephson, 14, 1942, pp. 26-30.

Leprechaun on the P a l i s a d e s ,

Clement G r e e n b e r g , The Nation,

Profile, N e w Yorker,

Feb. 1949.

Jerome M e l l q u i s t , John M a r i n , Painter of Specimen D a y s , American 56-9 September, 1949; John M a r i n , Rhapsodist of N a t u r e , College Art Journal, 13 4 : 310-12, 1954. Duncan P h i l l i p s , June 1950.

Retrospective

March

at

the

Venice

Biennale,

H e n r y M c B r i d e , Four Transoceanic Reputations, Art News, Dorothy Norman, Conversations with M a r i n , Art News, R. Rosenblum, M a r i n ' s Dynamism, M e m o r i a l Art Digest, 2 8 : 13, February 1, 1954.

Art

News,

Artist, 13 : Association 49:20-21,

4 9 : 26-9, January, 1951.

52: 38-9, December, 1953.

Show at the American

Academy,