The present work is exceptional in Marin’s oeuvre because of the collage elements that engage line and form in the work. Marin used collage and assemblage in a vanishingly small number of cases, but this practice had both precedents and implications for his colleagues. The collage and collag-esque elements of modern art were apparent in the early Cubist collaborations of Picasso and Braque, and many artists seized the concept of collage implicit in Cubism and its derivatives. This included some Americans, not least of which Joseph Stella, whose work would have been familiar to Marin. Marin certainly never embraced Cubism in a way that Picasso would have found familiar, but just as he put elements of the Cubist program to his own purposes, his absorption of Cubist collage evinces a similar distant family relation. An abiding element of Marin’s aesthetic, from his modernist awakening on, was his peculiar use of framing devices in his work. Ruth Fine describes “one aspect of Marin’s art that had become increasingly important beginning in the early 1920s” as his “attention to the outer edges of his work, his enclosures and frames of various sorts” [Ruth Fine, John Marin (1990), p. 201].

His propensity to control the edges of his work can be traced back to his etchings; he not only emphasized plate edges by leaving a layer of ink on their bevels but also incorporated explicitly drawn margins . . . Marin’s frames can be divided into three categories: those that appear within the painting itself, those that are part of a mount, and those that are more or less traditional frames.

The more metaphorical sense of “frames,” however, was in full display by 1923, which Fine identified as the “crucial” year [Ibid., p. 201]. The interior framing devices – “outer strokes [with] little interaction with the central form—as if a ‘modern’ device had been imposed on a picturesque scene” [Ibid.] – come into abundance between 1920 and 1923. Marin’s skies became activated with slashes, dotted boundary lines, and ensnaring rectangles, as the frame itself reached into the picture. This process reached the other direction to: most markedly in the very late 1940s and early ‘50s, Marin crafted his own frames, painting and carving as “boundaries as definite as the prow, the stern, the sides and bottom bound of a boat” [Ibid., p. 207]. The imperative was to have an “equilibrium,” in Marin’s words:

My picture must not make one feel that it bursts its boundaries. The framing cannot remedy. That would be a delusion and I would have it that nothing must cut my picture off from its finalities [Ibid.].

The collaged elements in the present work sprang to life at just this moment, and perhaps they can be added to Fine’s list of methods of engaging the frame. Certainly the lines and towers—cut strips of paper and sewn strings – perform the duties of enclosing usually done by watercolor. But beyond this, they also engage the world beyond the picture plane in a way that Marin seems to have sought the rest of his career. In the year before Crotch Island was created, Marin wrote to Stieglitz:

Someday I’ll get me a wall with glaring, hideous wallpaper and try and have my things so that they too will fight the things and not be worsted [Ibid., p. 203].

Here then, is that equilibrium with the wallpaper: a fighting picture that won’t stay on the mat. While it’s a faint gesture toward the third dimension, Marin seemed to regret, late in life, that he never pursued it further:

‘If I were younger,’ he’d say, ‘I’d plunge into sculpture, but my frame-making will have to satisfy my sculptural urges’ [Ibid., p. 207].