John Marin was a major early modernist, best known for his watercolors, but who also worked in oils and made many etchings.  Born in Rutherford, NJ, he had begun sketching with some seriousness by 1888.  His earliest watercolors combined elements of Impressionism and Tonalism.  They show the influence of Tonalists such as Dwight Tryon and also reveal some aberrations of form Marin would develop later.  In the early 1890s, he worked for four architects and by 1893 had designed six houses in Union Hill, NJ.  Deciding to become an artist, he studied at PAFA from 1899 to 1901 under Thomas Anshutz and at ASL from 1901 to 1903.  Marin went abroad I 1905 and remained there until 1910 with the exception of a brief return visit in 1909.  Unlike others who traveled to Europe in those years, he did not immediately become immersed in the most modern styles, preferring instead the art of James A. M. Whistler, Pierre Bonnard, ad the Nabis as well as Neoimpressionism.  Nevertheless, he met Edward Steichen and, through him, Alfred Stieglitz, who exhibited his work with Alfred Maurer’s in 1909 and then gave him a solo exhibition in 1910.  While abroad, Marin concentrated on printmaking (at least two-thirds of his roughly 180 etched plates were done between 1905 and 1913), a fact that may help account for his neglect of Paul Cézanne and the Cubists, whose graphic works were not yet well known.  Thus, preferring to paint objects that responded to the logical pull of gravity and infusing luminous atmospheric effects into his works, Marin remained a late 19th-century artist while in Europe.  His subjects were most often urban ones, except for the watercolors painted during a trip to the Austiran Alps in 1910.  After returning to America, Marin substituted New York City for Paris and Venice as an important subject.  His earlier integration of painting and drawing, which often produced a Whistlerian haze, was now interrupted by a quickened sense of line under broad areas of color, coiled through them, or thickened into independent segments of widened brushstrokes.  Although Marin began consciously to use “ray lines” around 1914, their presence was apparent from 1910 on.

In 1912 Marin’s style changed.  His use of color grew arbitrary and he initiated a more intimate relationship with his subject matter instead of simply trying to capture transient moods of nature and atmospheric variations.  Formal relations gained ascendancy over realistic description.  But, above all, Marin no longer sought a generalized, fin de siècle spiritualization of mood but an energized equivalent of the great forces he now began to feel coursing through all matter.  He attempted to represent the flux of life that moved through and carried along the objects of the world.  Although his interpretations were his own, he was probably influenced by Cézanne and Pablo Picasso, whose works were shown at Stieglitz’s gallery in 1911, and by the works of American modernists and the Orphists.  He may have known about the Futurists, whose works he was probably introduced to at second hand, through the catalogue of their great Paris exhibition of 1912.  in any event, Marin’s newly styled works, such as Movement, Fifth Avenue (1912, AIC), established him as a premier modernist.  Within the next few years, he refined his style, making shorthand notations to indicate buildings or, in his landscapes, leaving large areas of paper bare so that these areas might become vital forms interacting with landscape features.  The Cubist works at the Armory Show as well as the presence in new York of Francis Picabia and Albert Gleizes during World War I most probably contributed to Marin’s movement in the direction of abstraction, which reached its apogee about 1917, just after the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters in 1916.

Marin first went to Maine in 1914, and the many seascapes he painted there until the very end of his life reflect an intimacy with the northern ocean as profound as that of Winslow Homer, though Marin’s convey excitement rather than antagonism in the meeting of rocks, waves, and sand.  He began spending all his summers there after 1920, with the exception of visits to Taos, NM, in 1929 and 1930.  Consequently, his oeuvre consists of urban and rural scenes in roughly equal numbers.  Many of the rural pictures he painted about 1920 have been characterized by one historian as “color orgasms,” for, in painting pure color sensations, it seemed as though Marin were trying to convey the living, dynamic energies of nature.  His urban scenes, sometimes worm’s-eye views (Lower Manhattan, 1920, MOMA) and bird’s-eye views (Lower Manhattan [Composing Derived from Top of Woolworth], 1922, MOMA) capture, in unregimented, freeflowing brushwork, the excitement of the modern city.  Like his near-contemporary George Bellows, Marin responded emotionally to the forces of life, but in abstract rather than anecdotal ways.  Like Arthur G. Dove, another near-contemporary and fellow abstractionist, Marin brought to his pictures a vital energy that evoked, but did not replicate the movements and powers he felt residing in his subjects.  Perhaps to temper his exuberance, Marin began, in the early 1920s, to use the “frame within the frame” technique, by which thickened lines tied disparate images together (Sun, Sea, Land, Maine, 1921, Philadelphia Museum).  This type of compositional arrangement also accented both the flatness of the picture surface and the sense of depth suggested by the subject matter within the frames.  Through the 1920s, Marin’s work was, by turns, controlled and expressionistic.  Objects might be presented frontally or be dissolved in a welter of brushmarks.  Occasionally, human subjects appeared, but as parts of design schemes rather than as principal subjects.  Late in the decade, Marin began to devote more time to oil painting, developing turbulent effects similar to those he achieved in watercolor.  Pursuing his own vision, he was not influenced by the realistic tide of American Scene Painting and the geometrical formalism of the interwar years.  Instead, he maintained the buoyant optimism associated with the pre-World War I period.

Through the 1940s, Marin re-explored earlier styles he had developed.  However, about 1947 he began to emphasize line once again, this time as a virtually independent force, curving and wiry, dominating objects caught in its web.  Although in this he may have been influenced by Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, the development was consistent with Marin’s earlier work and may be considered as analogous to the expressionistic styles developed in their old age by artists as different as Donatello and Charles Burchfield.  Then too, Marin’s sources always lay in nature rather than myth or the unconscious.  His last paintings reflected a tempestuous response to nature as did the works of the 1912-13 period.

Marin wrote about himself and his art in a Whitmanesque manner, celebrating both nature and his responses to it in a grand way.  The major collection of his etchings is in the Philadelphia Museum.  Many watercolors and oils are in MMA.

LITERATURE
Sheldon Reich, John Marin, 1970