John Marin 1870-1953

A foremost American modernist of the early 20^th century, John Marin was among the most highly acclaimed artists of his time.  His close friendship and successful working relationship with Alfred Stieglitz heightened Marin’s exposure, with annual one-man exhibitions appearing at Stieglitz’s galleries between 1909 and 1950.  In 1913, Marin wrote about his impressions of New York City and its impact on his work:  “Shall we consider the life of a great city as confined simply to the people and animals on its streets and in its building?  Are the buildings themselves dead?  We have been told somewhere 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. . . 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. . .While these powers are at work pushing, pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife and there is great music being played.  And so I try to express graphically what a great city is doing” (Modern Art and American: Alfred Stieglitz and His New York Galleries, Washington, D.C., 2000, p. 129 and Leigh Bullard Weisblat, The Eye of Duncan Phillips: A Collection in the Making, Washington, D.C., 1999, p. 383).

New York City was a favorite subject for Marin, and one which he explored throughout his career.  Painted in 1934, New York Abstraction uses fragmented lines and abstract forms to express the vitality and frenzy Marin saw in the buildings and streets of the city. The artist’s images of New York celebrate the accomplishments of man in the context of the early 20^th Century urban landscape. Klaus Kertess writes, “In the twenties, the effusive spontaneity so visible in the watercolors and oils of the mid-teens was joined by Cubist architectonics—now more dramatically than in the paler Lower Manhattan scenes done between 1912 and 1914.  Broader thrusting strokes fly into prismatic flux.  The contours of buildings are overlaid with open and closed triangular planes that frame the skyscrapers with monumental vectors of energy.  Emphatic black lines defining silhouettes or simply driven by their own concerns underscore a more vivid palette.  Marin’s Cubism has a wacky vicariousness; it veers and turns into irreverent configurations whose seemingly electrified calligraphy shows little respect for the cool clarity and regularity of most other Cubists’ planes” (Marin in Oil, Southampton, New York, 1987, p. 41).

The collector Duncan Phillips, who purchased nearly thirty works by Marin for his museum, “believed that John Marin was ‘one of the most gifted and important painters since Cezanne.’  Phillips admired Marin’s ability to capture his immediate impression of a landscape, as well as his facility for recording the syncopated rhythm of contemporary life.  He considered him to be an artist of great originality, independent of artistic movements or influences, who was ‘too great for America alone’” (Leigh Bullard Weisblat, The Eye of Duncan Phillips: A Collection in the Making, Washington, D.C., 1999, p. 380).