John Marin: Communing with the Colossal

 "...To the optical eye [New York City] may seem solid and stable; but to the eye of the spirit, visioning, the elements and qualities of energy that created and inform it, it may seem a very vortex of conflicting forces. / [Marin] tried to symbol forth these visions of invisible reality, swirling, thrusting, soaring, tottering around him. But it was not until he had spent a summer in the Tyrol, communing with the colossal, but comparatively stable, phenomena of mountains, forests and valleys that he began to find himself and learn how to control the magnitude of his impressions."

—Charles Caffin, New York American, January 27, 1913, reprinted in Camera Work, no. 48, October 1916, p. 37

About John Marin

John Marin is a pioneer in modern art, and one of America’s greatest painters. Marin’s contributions to Modernism are widely recognized among an international audience some seventy-five years after he became the first American to earn a retrospective exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1950. Marin enjoyed continued critical and commercial success throughout his career, which was instigated by his meeting influential gallerist Alfred Stieglitz in 1909—a pivotal moment for the artist as Stieglitz championed Marin’s advancements in abstraction and in watercolor as a medium for many decades.

Perhaps most enticing, however, from the perspectives of both visual iconography and emotional response to the artist’s work, are the bursts of energy with which Marin paints. In an early watercolor from the artist’s first summer in Maine in 1914, or in a late oil painted in 1952, the same fervor is expressed, the same restless and relentless energy with which Marin sought to capture the natural world. It is in the translation of this experience from Marin’s eyes to our own in which the artist’s brilliance and impact is at its best.

Click here to read 'John Marin: A Biography' by Jonathan Spies

Click here to read 'John Marin: A Biography' by Jonathan Spies

'Working in oil on small pieces of canvas board near the waters and harbors of Manhattan, John Marin (1870-1953) was possibly the first American artist to make abstract paintings. There are other candidates among them Marsden Hartley and Georgia O’Keeffe but it is thought that Marin got there first.'

—Roberta Smith, “John Marin: The Weehawken Sequence,” The New York Times, Feb. 17, 2011

“I have discovered it—this perfection is getting to be damned tiresome—not to be able to make a mistake now and then / Cusses and more cusses / Doomed / to singing and praising by my own beautiful river—nuts—Oh you One—please show me the way—the way to paint something—not quite a masterpiece . . .”