John Marin 1870-1953

John Marin’s long and prolific career is best marked by his fervent love of painting and abiding belief that art must relate to lived experiences. His best work strikes a delicate balance between abstraction and reality. His commitment to conveying the “realness” of a given subject through an abstract vocabulary of line, shape, color and texture is what defines his artistic singularity. Marin’s work never lost its vigor, even as he returned to the same themes and places over the course of his life. With each return he investigated a subject anew and applied his unflagging creativity and innovation to convey the full force of his experience and imagination.

Marin is one of those unique artists who would have been great whether or not he had any formal art training, as his passion for and commitment to his work was unflagging even as his health failed at the end of his life. His interest in drawing began when he was young, and he initially honed his skill in mechanical drawing at the Stevens Institute of Technology. He then worked as an architectural draftsman and even set up his own firm. Marin abandoned this pursuit by 1897, and by 1899 he had enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he would study until 1901. He probably did not spend a lot of time in class; in fact, he might have taken night courses, which would have allowed him to roam around Philadelphia for countless hours making sketches of the city—an exercise that would be lifelong. In 1900 he was awarded a prize at the Academy for an outdoor sketch.

Marin met Alfred Stieglitz in 1909. The relationship and friendship the two men would share until Stieglitz’s death in 1946 was formative for both. Stieglitz exhibited Marin’s work more than any other of his artists except for Georgia O’Keeffe. His support of Marin’s career was crucial to the artist’s extraordinary productivity and enormous popularity with critics and collectors alike. The acclaim that Marin received during his lifetime surpassed all of his contemporaries.

Marin was a rugged individualist; it informed his life and art. He developed a singular working method and artistic style that he consistently built upon throughout his career. Line was essential to his artistic practice, and drawing was as “natural as breathing.” Marin’s first experiments with abstraction took place in the 1910s, and even as his vocabulary became more abstract, he did not abandon his insistence on the primacy of nature. Unlike many of his peers, Marin never delved into pure abstraction and instead retained some recognizable imagery.

Marin’s two principle subjects, the landscape and the city, provided him with endless inspiration, with his experience in one setting informing and influencing his experience of the other. The landscape was foremost for Marin, and he was deeply connected to Maine. His landscapes are fresh with his love of paint and fresh with discovery and vibrance. The staccato marks of form and line and the explosions of color are very much connected to his great love for music. Indeed the feeling and energy that Marin conveys in his landscapes are similar to the abstract nature of music itself.

Marin painted Maples in Autumn in 1949. Like his other landscape paintings, he beautifully captures the restless energy of the natural world. He took the scene directly from nature, but never intended to merely transcribe it. Instead, his goal was to capture nature’s spirit and the experience he had in it. The line in this work and others of this period is more calligraphic and less sharp. There is something legato and cheerful about the way he paints the scene, and the riot of red leaves bursts with vitality. Marin’s work at its finest is lyrical and full of feeling. Maples in Autumn is a wonderful example of the vibrance that defined the artist’s practice and his deep relationship to and experience in the natural world.