John Marin

JOHN MARIN went to Europe and returned before he discovered America. This happened to him in middle life after long years of tentative essays. New and bolder means were needed to convey the raw, vivid country which he now saw. New York and Maine--steel and rock--with a feeling for motion sluicing through them or breaking over them--these were his subjects, and for the rest of his life he simplified his means of expression.

Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1870. His mother died at his birth, and he was brought up by two maiden aunts at Weehawken. School past, he worked in a wholesale notion house and then in an architect's office. He was twenty-eight when he took up art, passing for a failure at all else. He went to the Pennsylvania Academy for two years, wasted time over the motionless plaster cast, and was no further along five years out of art school. His father, relenting, sent him to Paris, but Marin somehow missed the excitement of the scene. A restless vagabondage, a few etchings in the vein of Whistler, a good game of billiards and watercolors intriguingly simplified were the net result. Steichen saw the paintings and took them home to Alfred Stieglitz, America's great impresario of modern art. Stieglitz showed the watercolors in New York, promoted Marin for many years, building a legend--a counter-legend to himself--out of Marin's aloof genius. It was through Stieglitz that Marin discovered the quintessence of European painting that he had missed abroad.

During the 1910's Marin worked out a new brittle shorthand in his watercolors. As in golf, he said, the fewest number of strokes won the game. These strokes he applied to New York City--the Woolworth Building, the Brooklyn Bridge--which had also been a target for his etching. In summer, he extended his frontier into New England, and finally discovered Maine. For many years Maine gave Marin what it gave Hartley, the elementals of sky, sea, rock and tree so clean and stark that he had his building materials in basic terms.

Marin aimed at the essential characteristic. "Pertaining to" in his titles--Pertaining to Deer Isle--describes his selective vision. Physically, Maine allowed him to become the pioneer in living that he had become in his work. As time went on Marin moved further and further East. He lived at Small Point beyond Portland from 1915 to 1920; went on to Stonington on the Atlantic side of Deer Isle until 1933, when he made a final remove to Cape Split, close to the rocky edge of the country. In winters he lived in Cliffside, on the Jersey Palisades, within sight of New York and not too far from his childhood home. He died in 1953.

In Marin, jigsaw patterns hint at a cubist origin, but actually the forms are dictated by the need of motion. Representation goes over into symbols for economy and speed. Marin was irked by the static monotony of the rectangular frame, and a few bold strokes, banking on the frame like billiard shots, enclosed the painting with an appropriate geometry. Composition, for him, works out as a controlled progression through a painting, a navigation from headland to headland.

For Marin, watercolor had provided the light baggage of the explorer. But he had always painted in oils, and by the 1940's the emphasis definitely shifted to the heavier medium, which better suited his needs. He now used oil paint for additional impact and power rather than for mass, and to a large degree he retained the qualities of watercolor. In straining a medium to suit a purpose he became a pioneer again. The shift compared to his removal to Cape Split, to a bolder, lonelier region in place of the now-familiar, in quest of freedom, and a final frontier.

Marin : I see rocks upriver and the water flowing. All right, I put down the rocks on my paper. Then I show how the water runs past the rocks. The water is more white than colored, you notice, but you have to use color--never mind what color--or you couldn't show how the water runs along on white paper. Now, I say to myself, the most important thing about a river is that it runs downhill. So I put on the color with strokes that show how the water runs downhill past the rocks. Simple, isn't it?

The sea that I paint may not be the sea, but it is a sea, not an abstraction.

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