Fig. 1 The Red Sun, Brooklyn Bridge, 1922
Watercolour and charcoal on paper
21 3/8 x 26 3/16 inches
The Art Institute of Chicago; Alfred Stieglitz Collection
1949.R.22.109.
Making the Case for Another Look
The modernist artist John Marin (1870-1953) was in the forefront of contemporary American art when he characterised his works as “constructed expressions of the inner senses, responding to things seen and felt” in the catalogue accompanying the important Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters held in New York in 1916. This concise, but revealing phrase encapsulates the creative spirit that persisted in Marin’s art from the very beginnings of his career through his last years, when he was lionized as the greatest living American painter. Never a fan of “isms,” Marin flirted with elements of Cubism, Futurism, and most other major art movements of the early-twentieth century, but eschewed commitment to any theory or style but his own. At the root of his process was the idea of two types of vision – the thing observed by the eye and the inner vision of the mind that inflected it – “things seen and felt.” His subject matter was deemed consistently “American” in its outlook, whether it focused on the dynamism of urban growth, lyrical watercolour views of the American forests, or heavily impasted oils depicting the churning Atlantic off the Maine coast. Marin’s prominence in the history of American art was cemented when fifty-five of his paintings were featured in the American Pavilion at the 1950 Venice Biennale, headlining a display that also included works by six younger American painters, among them Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) and Willem de Kooning (1904-1997).
Marin retains his place as a major figure in the canon of American art history, but his art is little known on this side of the Atlantic. This is no small irony since Marin had been a presence on the British art scene intermittently since his etchings were first noted in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1913. More than four decades on, a critic for the (London) Times praised his small watercolours for their “explosive force,” when they were shown in the Tate’s 1956 exhibition, Modern Art in the United States -- a reaction that doubtless prompted the Tate’s purchase of Marin’s 1923 watercolour, Downtown, New York, that same year. Commenting on the artist’s one-man exhibition held at London’s Waddington Galleries in 1963, another Times reviewer expressed surprise that Marin’s art had not taken firm hold in Britain. The time seems right for the British art audience to take another look at Marin and his work, if only to understand and confirm the importance of a career that has been positioned as the generational and stylistic bridge between the realist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) and the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, a stance that places him in a line of painters commonly categorised as being quintessentially American. In retrospect, however, such a nationalistic approach curiously discounts the crucial formative years (1905-1910) that Marin spent in Europe, which led to a hybrid artistic vision that was neither purely American nor purely European, but rather, both.
Unpromising Beginnings
Marin’s early years held little hint of the renown he would achieve. His mother died just days after his birth in Rutherford, New Jersey, and he was raised by his maternal grandparents and two maiden aunts in Weehawken, and in Union City, New Jersey. His contact with his father was only intermittent, but the elder Marin provided financial support and participated in decisions about his son’s education. By his own account, Marin’s school years at various public institutions left him uninspired and he spent much of his time drawing at the expense of academic pursuits. His penchant for drawing melded with his father’s decision that he be sent to the Stevens Institute of Technology, where, in 1886, he enrolled in a three-year degree program in mechanical engineering. Details for this period are scarce, but Marin’s tenure at the Institute was brief – he dropped out after six months. However, his skills as a draftsman must have been relatively strong since he reportedly worked for several architectural firms and, from around 1892 to 1897, he operated his own architectural office, designing houses. His earliest known watercolours (mainly landscapes) date to 1888 and it can be safely assumed that this practice was continuous, if not thoroughly documented in its initial phases. By 1899, his plans for a career as an artist had solidified as witnessed by his attendance from 1899 to 1901 at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Nothing tangible remains to document his studies there under Thomas Anschutz (1851-1912) and Hugh Breckenridge (1870-1937); according to Marin’s own eccentrically constructed biographical accounts, his classroom experiences were no match for what he gleaned from his own observations of nature.
Despite winning an Academy prize in 1900 for drawings executed in the outdoors, Marin’s dissatisfaction with his classroom instruction prompted his departure from Philadelphia. Again, he seems to have entered a hiatus from formal training -- one of those periods described in his biographical notes as “blanks” -- only to resume training at the Art Students League in New York, studying under the academic painter Frank Vincent DuMond (1865-1951) in either 1902-3 or 1903-4. This was followed by yet another “blank” stretch of time that ended with his departure for Europe in September 1905.
Europe
Marin’s European sojourn lasted until the autumn of 1910, apart from an approximately five-month interlude in the United States from late 1909 to May 1910. Much of his time was spent in Paris, where his younger stepbrother, the artist Charles Bittinger (1879-1970), was already well-established in the American expatriate community. As was his habit, Marin attempted formal training, enrolling briefly at the Académie Delécluse and the Académie Julian, the latter being a long-favoured training ground for American art students. Both stints seem to have come to naught, but he found stimulation in mastering a new medium, etching – which would form a significant and highly valued portion of his oeuvre. Over the course of his European stay Marin created a considerable number of prints, many of which show the influence of James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) and Charles Meryon (1821-1868) and range from tightly handled images of architectural landmarks he saw on his travels in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Italy, to more schematic impressions of buildings under varying light conditions. With the help of the Chicago print dealer Albert Roullier whom he met in Paris in 1907, Marin was able to derive some income from the sale of his etchings, while he continued to paint in oils and his preferred medium, watercolour.
Not much is known of Marin’s day-to-day activities in Paris. Surely, he was aware of the seismic shift in the arts that was taking place in Europe (and in Paris especially) at the time of his arrival and throughout his years there. What he absorbed is best gleaned through examining his art. Although he generally abstained from participating in organizations or communal activities (he reportedly avoided attending the famed salon of Leo and Gertrude Stein that was frequented by American and European artists alike), he did join the New Society of American Artists in Paris in 1908, along with colleagues Max Weber (1881-1961), Alfred Maurer (1868-1932), and Patrick Henry Bruce (1881-1936), among others. Records testify to his exhibiting at the Salon des Artistes Indépendants and the Salon d’Automne and, from what can be gathered, he was making a mark in Parisian art circles: his oil, Mills at Meaux, was purchased by the French government in 1907 and the first article devoted to him was published in L’ Art decoratif in 1908.
It is without doubt that the most important event of Marin’s European experiences was his meeting with the influential photographer Edward Steichen (1879-1973). Steichen had seen and admired Marin’s watercolours at the 1908 Salon d’Automne and was soon after introduced to Marin by their mutual friend Arthur Carles (1882-1952). (Marin and Carles had met as students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and became life-long friends.) Steichen, by this time, was closely affiliated with the American photographer and pioneering promoter of modernist art, Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946). As the guiding spirit behind the Photo-Secession group, Stieglitz operated a series of New York galleries, the first of which was the famed Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession (later called “291”), which opened in 1905 at 291 Fifth Avenue. Stieglitz would go on to become a powerhouse behind the advancement of modernism in the United States, catering to an exclusive circle of patrons whom he deemed worthy of acquiring the select works offered in his galleries.
Steichen’s enthusiasm for Marin’s watercolours prompted him to send a group of them to Stieglitz in New York. Obviously impressed, Stieglitz mounted a two-man exhibition of 25 of Marin’s watercolours and 15 oils by Maurer that opened at 291 in March 1909. With this – and an exhibition of 36 of his European etchings that had been shown at Albert Roullier’s Chicago Gallery that January -- Marin’s career was surely on the upswing. Marin and Stieglitz finally met in Paris that June, an encounter that possibly finalized details for the artist’s first one-man exhibition at 291 held in February 1910 (a selection of 43 watercolours, 20 pastels, and 8 etchings). This flurry of stateside activity doubtless encouraged Marin’s stay in the United States from roughly December 1909 until he returned to Paris in May 1910, buoyed by the promise of additional support from Stieglitz and filled with creative energy. In just a few months he accomplished some of his most freely brushed watercolours to that point – namely a series of landscapes featuring the Kaiser Mountain Range, executed during a six-week stay in the medieval village of Kufstein In Austria.
Marin’s time in Europe came to an end in the autumn of 1910 and he may have viewed the display of ten of his watercolours at the Salon d’Automne at the Grand Palais that October as a fitting farewell to the continent that had served as inspiration and as a proving ground for his art. He returned to the United States without looking back, never to travel to Europe again.
Stieglitz, Watercolours, and Cultural Nationalism
Much of Marin’s success depended on the invaluable support he received from Stieglitz. From the outset of his association with 291, Marin could not only rely on Stieglitz’s promise of a one-man exhibition of his art each year, but also on the photographer’s enduring financial support, which allowed Marin to concentrate on his art away from New York without worry – an arrangement that lasted until Stieglitz’s death in 1946.
True to his word, Stieglitz regularly featured Marin’s work, making him a core member of 291’s select stable of young American modernists that included Arthur Dove (1880-1946), Maurer, Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Weber, and Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986, who married Stieglitz in 1924). Throughout his career, watercolour was Marin’s primary medium; he continued to produce etchings and oils, although sporadically. At the beginning of the twentieth century watercolour painting carried substantial importance in the nation’s arts, leading critics to proclaim it the “American medium.” The freshness, spontaneity, and inventiveness it conjured were seen as vital cultural metaphors for the new democracy and the freedoms it promised; thus, watercolour became most closely aligned with the idea of the modern American spirit – mainly because of the range of experimentation for which its practitioners were noted. Out of the need to create a new hero of mythic stature to fill the gap left by Winslow Homer’s death in 1910, critics eagerly cast Marin in the role of the grand isolate, working in a purely intuitive mode.
Marin certainly fit the bill and it might be valid to suppose that he determinedly cultivated the critics’ conclusions. Granted, it was his nature to avoid theories, “isms,” and organizations. Moreover, it was his preference to work alone in nature (after his first visit to rural Maine in 1914, Marin would spend most of his summers there) and to live away from the uproar of city life (he spent his winters in suburban Cliffside, New Jersey, in an unimposing home purchased in 1920). Yet, taking his art and his own unique writing style into consideration, it is possible to imagine that Marin himself colluded in constructing the myth of heroic cultural naturalism that eventually defined him, even though he developed a modernist mode that contained more than a few traces of European influence. Writing in the catalogue for his 1913 exhibition at 291, Marin rhapsodized about the energies of urban progress: “I see great forces at work; great movements; the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and small; influences of one mass on another greater or smaller mass. Feelings are aroused which gives me the desire to express the reaction of these ‘pull forces,’ those influences which play with one another; great masses pulling smaller masses, each subject in some degree to the other’s power.” This passage relates especially to Marin’s remarkable series of watercolors featuring the Woolworth Building in various stages of completion that were among twenty-eight works on view at 291 in early 1913, some of which travelled a few blocks to hang in the famed Armory Show (formally called the International Exhibition of Modern Art) that opened just two days after Marin’s exhibition closed. In the Woolworth series, Marin’s images of the structure become increasingly abstract as the building itself seems to come alive, surging upward until it emerges as a spiraling form of pure energy in the final works of the series. Although some critics interpreted Marin’s transitions toward abstraction as being uniquely American statements of the nation’s dynamic progress, others detected formal elements signifying European roots, sometimes finding traces of Futurism and Orphism, discovering the influence of Paul Cezanne (whose watercolours were showcased at 291 in 1911), and even citing the residual effect of Claude Monet’s series in terms of his penchant for repeatedly depicting the same subject. A similar amalgam of American and European influences may be detected in Marin’s writing, which in this instance echoes the poetic imagery of Walt Whitman while suggesting his awareness of the language of Futurism.
Marin’s cityscapes of this period focus on the radical changes that occurred in the look and atmosphere of New York life as the country emerged as a power on the world stage. In Marin’s hands the swaying form of the Brooklyn Bridge, the explosive force of the Woolworth Building (at its completion, the world’s tallest building), and the hulking mass of the Municipal Building – all icons of America’s vitality and innovation – were formally expressed in a visual idiom that derived from European sources, synthesized to achieve a modernist American vernacular.
Artistic Maturity and Celebrity
Marin was fortunate in the financial stability and constant exhibition outlets for his art that Stieglitz provided him, all of which allowed him to devote his time to his art without constraint. He married his fiancée Marie Jane Hughes in December 1912 (at the age of 42) and their only child, John, was born in 1914. After a few peripatetic years, the family settled into a regular rhythm of spending summers in various rural areas and wintering in suburban New Jersey. Although he maintained contact with fellow artists (especially those in the Stieglitz circle), Marin was inclined to live a solitary existence, taking pleasure mainly in the company of family and close friends, and working alone.
By 1920 Marin’s art had achieved maturity; the early years of experimentation yielded a style that was unquestionably modernist in approach and unmistakably his own. Writing in 1921, the critic Paul Strand declared Marin’s watercolours as the “supreme proof of the actuality of an American painter, of the possibility of American painting.” The Red Sun, Brooklyn Bridge (Fig. 1) stands as a major example of Marin’s treatment of a familiar scene for New Yorkers – the view from the walkway of the Brooklyn Bridge, the engineering feat that spanned the East River linking Brooklyn and Manhattan. Marin engaged a rich combination of opaque, transparent, scratched, and reserved passages, all of which are set off by roughly applied strokes of charcoal in what can be interpreted as a material assault on traditional watercolour techniques. Seen through harsh charcoal striations representing the bridge cables is a composition that emphasizes the divide between the power of nature and that of national progress as signified by the cliff-like mass of buildings in lower Manhattan. The two elements – the built environment and the roiling waters under a burning sun – call to mind a longstanding cultural trope pitting nature against progress that still shapes American thought. The experimental character of this work is heightened by the artist’s seemingly arbitrary placement of ancillary linear elements and haphazard patches of colour as well as the spots of blue squeezed directly from a paint tube to form the windows of the buildings on the right. An example of Marin’s puckish humour surfaces with the sketchy drawing of a horse in the lower right corner, perhaps placed there as a nostalgic reminder of the vanishing means of transport then being overtaken in the modern age.
Movement – Sea or Mountain As You Will (Fig. 2) embodies a more lyrical aspect of Marin’s art. Executed in oil, the canvas demonstrates the extraordinary level of painterly freedom Marin achieved in his later years – a goal toward which he had worked for his entire career. Categorised as one of Marin’s “calligraphic” works, the painting displays a lively network of freely brushed gestural strokes that are disrupted by dark, jagged markings throughout the composition. The apparently randomly arranged areas of blues and greens refer to the “sea or mountain” as the title suggests, while the energetic brushwork perfectly captures the notion of movement. Marin’s idiosyncratic playfulness is underscored in the title, where the viewer is invited to determine the subject matter “as you will.” As with the compositional and thematic opposition of nature and progress in The Red Sun, Brooklyn Bridge, Marin again exalted in exploring another set of dualities, focusing here on painterly evocations of sea against mountains until the watery elements and the mountainous shapes become nearly indistinguishable but for their colours as the eye sweeps over them.
With the death of his wife in 1945 and that of Stieglitz in July of the following year, Marin’s emotional life was much altered. He suffered a heart attack in the spring of 1946, and thereafter relied on his son for considerable practical support. Despite physical and emotional obstacles, Marin’s urge to create did not diminish. Nor did the demand for his art. After Stieglitz died, Georgia O’Keeffe assumed management of An American Place (the last in the succession of Stieglitz’s New York galleries) and together, she and Marin took over the lease of the space until 1950, when Edith Gregor Halpert of the Downtown Gallery became his dealer. Under Halpert’s aegis, Marin’s art continued to be overwhelmingly popular with critics and the public; her respect for his art is confirmed by the fact that she maintained a “John Marin Room” at the gallery, reserved for his work alone.
Marin died at Cape Split, Maine, in 1953, leaving a body of work destined to endure in the annals of American art. The question of his influence on the development of abstract expressionism remains a subject of some debate: although he explored complete abstraction on occasion, he clearly rejected embracing it as his principal means of expression and stayed true to his belief in two types of vision – “things seen and felt.” As a final statement on the subject, Marin’s terse comment should prevail: “There never was or never will be a non-objective art.”
