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John Marin
1870–1953
BirthplaceRutherford, New Jersey, United States of America
Death placeCape Split, Addison, Maine, United States of America
BiographyOne of America’s pioneering early modernist artists, John Marin created a personal vocabulary for expressing the dynamism of the urban landscape in the medium of watercolor painting. Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, and grew up in nearby Weehawken. Trained as an architect, he designed houses in Union Hill, New Jersey, before studying art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Marin was a mature art student of thirty-five when he made his first visit to Europe, in 1905. After briefly studying at the Delecluse Academy and the Académie Julian in Paris, he traveled extensively, creating romantic images in watercolor and etching (a print medium) of quaint architecture in a decorative manner influenced by American artist James McNeill Whistler. In Paris, circulating on the fringes of circles of American expatriate artists experimenting with modernist styles, he was introduced to photographer and influential art dealer Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), who became his lifelong friend and champion. Stieglitz began exhibiting Marin’s work at his New York gallery in 1909, managing the artist’s business affairs so skillfully that Marin was left free to pursue his art.
When he returned permanently to New York in 1911 after more than five years abroad, Marin was overwhelmed by the city’s bold modern architecture, especially the skyscrapers. He began painting them in watercolors in a new style directly inspired by the city’s dynamism and vitality and drawn in part from contemporary artistic movements, notably the then-developing style known as cubism, in which the forms of everyday objects are presented as series of their component planes and angles. Marin, however, conveyed the tension and tumult of the city with an expressionist energy, making the most of watercolor’s lightness and spontaneity as he fractured forms into lines and color areas with an exuberant randomness.
In 1914, with the first of what became annual summer excursions to the coast of Maine, Marin began to paint the sea and rural landscapes. He also portrayed the distinctive topography of the Southwest in watercolors made during two visits to Taos, New Mexico, in 1929 and 1930. The city remained a primary subject, however, even in his later years, when Marin moved across the Hudson River to nearby Cliffside, New Jersey. Although his paintings never became entirely abstract, he experimented with compositional structure and techniques for framing his compositions that temper his expressive application of paint with abstract order. In the late 1920s, Marin began to devote more time to oil painting, discovering in its capacity for slowly worked surfaces new means of achieving the turbulent effects he sought. The joyous optimism and energy of Marin’s work helped make him one of America’s most popular artists in the 1930s and 1940s; in 1936, for example, he was honored with a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
When he returned permanently to New York in 1911 after more than five years abroad, Marin was overwhelmed by the city’s bold modern architecture, especially the skyscrapers. He began painting them in watercolors in a new style directly inspired by the city’s dynamism and vitality and drawn in part from contemporary artistic movements, notably the then-developing style known as cubism, in which the forms of everyday objects are presented as series of their component planes and angles. Marin, however, conveyed the tension and tumult of the city with an expressionist energy, making the most of watercolor’s lightness and spontaneity as he fractured forms into lines and color areas with an exuberant randomness.
In 1914, with the first of what became annual summer excursions to the coast of Maine, Marin began to paint the sea and rural landscapes. He also portrayed the distinctive topography of the Southwest in watercolors made during two visits to Taos, New Mexico, in 1929 and 1930. The city remained a primary subject, however, even in his later years, when Marin moved across the Hudson River to nearby Cliffside, New Jersey. Although his paintings never became entirely abstract, he experimented with compositional structure and techniques for framing his compositions that temper his expressive application of paint with abstract order. In the late 1920s, Marin began to devote more time to oil painting, discovering in its capacity for slowly worked surfaces new means of achieving the turbulent effects he sought. The joyous optimism and energy of Marin’s work helped make him one of America’s most popular artists in the 1930s and 1940s; in 1936, for example, he was honored with a retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.