John Marin American, 1870-1953

Tree Forms, Stonington, Maine retains the original frame.

Tree Forms, Stonington, Maine testifies to Marin’s developing expressive confidence. As a recurring motif throughout Marin’s body of work, Ruth Fine suggests the lone tree serves as a metaphor for “inner travels” and “existence.” [1] In this marvelous example, the monumental scale of the tree dominates the composition. “A tree is fifty feet high,” Marin wrote in a letter to Stieglitz that year, “if you paint it you must get a piece of paper or canvas fifty feet and over in height. That is the…logic foreign to the logic of the eye...the artist…seems to be born with Eye feeling. He eyes something and must express it with his hands in some medium.” [2]

Marin executed his vision in this work with confident mark-making and economy of form, in a completely innovative approach encapsulated by Duncan Phillips: “Individualist, largely self-taught, indifferent to theories, [Marin] sought from the beginning of his career to find abbreviated and personal symbols of color and line — a green triangle for a pine tree, a zigzag for a wave — symbols comparable to the characters Chinese, but still pictorial.” [3]

[1] Ruth E. Fine, John Marin, Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1990, 189.

[2] Letter from Marin to Alfred Stieglitz, Stonington, Maine, September 20, 1919, in Dorothy Norman, The Selected Writings of John Marin, New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1949, 49-50.

[3] Duncan Phillips in the Venice Biennale XXV Catalogue