John Marin was an American modernist artist and printmaker. He was one of the first Americans to employ techniques of abstraction in his calligraphic depictions of landscapes and city streets.
Background
John Marin was born on December 23, 1870 in Rutherford, New Jersey, United States. The son of an accountant. His mother died nine days after his birth, and he was raised by two aunts in Weehawken, New Jersey. John Marin stayed with them for 30 years.
Education
His father wanted him to study business, so John Marin attended the Stevens Institute of Technology for a year, and tried unsuccessfully to become an architect. His aunts knew he hated it and pressured his father to let him go to art school.
From 1899 to 1901, Marin attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. In Philadelphia he studied with Thomas Pollock Anshutz and William Merritt Chase.
He also studied at the Art Students League of New York.
Career
In 1905 Marin went to Europe, initially to Paris, where he developed his signature watercolor technique and met the artist Edward Steichen. He exhibited his work in the Salon, where he also got his first exposure to modern art. He traveled through Europe for six years, and painted in the Netherlands, Belgium, England, and Italy.
Marin held his first one-man exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery in New York City in 1909. He also participated in the landmark 1913 Armory Show. There he became familiar with Cubism and the various schools of German Expressionism. Influenced by those movements, his own style matured into a very personal form of expressionism, exemplified in works such as "The Singer Building" (1921) and "Maine Islands" (1922).
Marin spent the summers of 1929 and 1930 in Taos, New Mexico, and produced 100 watercolors that were shown to great acclaim at Stieglitz’s gallery An American Place in 1930 and 1931. From the 1930s Marin increasingly painted with oils. In 1936 a retrospective exhibition of Marin’s work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
In works using this medium, such as "Tunk Mountains", Maine (1945), he often employed the watercolour technique of dragging a nearly dry brush across the canvas to achieve an effect of lightness and transparency.
In 1947 another major retrospective was held at the Institute of Modern Art in Boston, after which Look magazine pronounced him “America’s Artist No. 1.” In 1949 a major retrospective exhibition of his oils, watercolors, and etchings was held at the M. H. De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco.
Marin died on October 1, 1953, shortly before his 83rd birthday, at his summer home in Addison, Maine, United States.
Views
Quotations:
"I see great forces at work; great movements ... pushing, pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife and there is great music to be played. And so I try to express graphically what a great city is doing."
"I must for myself insist that when finished, that is when all the parts are in place and are working, that now it has become an object and will therefore have its boundaries as definite as the prow, the stern, the sides, and bottom bound as a boat."