John Marin 1870-1953

Lisa Marie Marin, New York (granddaughter of the artist)
The Downtown Gallery, New York
Marlborough Gallery, New  York
Andrew Crispo Gallery, New York, circa 1969
Acquired by the present owner from the above

New York, Downtown Gallery, John Marin - Oil Paintings, January-February 1963
Los Angeles, California, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco, California, M. H. de Young Memorial Museum; San Diego, California, The Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego; New York, Whitney Museum of American Art; Washington, D.C., National Collection of Fine Arts, John Marin, 1870-1953; A Centennial Exhibition, July 1970-June 1971, no. 73, illustrated in color
San Diego, California, Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, John Marin, November 1970-January 1971
New York, Andrew Crispo Gallery, Pioneers of American Abstraction: Bluemner, Davis, Demuth, Dove, Marin, O'Keeffe, Sheeler, Stella, and Weber, October-November 1973, no. 78, illustrated in color
New York, Andrew Crispo Gallery, John Marin: Some Oil Paintings, Some Watercolors and Some Drawings, April-May 1974, no. 18
New York, Andrew Crispo Gallery, One Hundred Years of European and American Paintings: 1875-1975, September 1975
Omaha, Nebraska, Joslyn Art Museum, The Growing Spectrum of American Art, September-November 1975
New York, Stephen Gemberling Gallery, The American Landscape 1776-1976: A Bicentennial Exhibition, July 1976, no. 44
New York, Andrew Crispo Gallery, Paris/New York 1910s to 1930s: The Influences of Paris on New York and American Artists in the 20th Century, June 1977, no. 45
Edinburgh, Scotland, Royal Scottish Academy; London, Hayward Gallery, The Modern Spirit, August-November 1977, no. 44
Dusseldorf, Germany, Stadtische Kunsthalle Dusseldorf, 2 Jahrzehnte amerikanische Malerei 1920-1940 (Two Decades of American Painting, 1920-1940), June-August 1979
New York, Canova and Rittenhouse Fine Art Gallery, The Formative Years of 20th Century American Art, October-November 1992, no. 54a
Roslyn, New York, Nassau County Museum of Art, Landscape of America, November 1991-February 1992, illustrated in color

Sheldon Reich, John Marin: A Stylistic Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II, Tucson, Arizona, 1970, no. 28.43, p. 595, illustrated

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John Marin was among the most widely known and admired artists in America during his lifetime. Born in 1870 in Rutherford, New Jersey, Marin was trained as an architect but after several years of practice, he decided to pursue a career as an artist.  He began his formal artistic training in 1899 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts with Thomas Anshutz and Hugh Henry Breckenridge.   In 1902, he studied at the Art Students League in New York before leaving for Paris in 1905. During the first decade of the 20^th century Paris was a rite of passage for most American artists and like many of his peers, Marin enrolled at the famed Académie Julian.  While his training at the Académie was formal and academic, his time in Paris exposed him to the avant-garde art of the Cubists and Fauves and other progressive European modernists.  In Paris, Marin also met the photographer and painter Edward Steichen.  This introduction proved to be a major turning point in Marin's career since Steichen brought a few of Marin's watercolors back to the United States and showed them to Alfred Stieglitz. At this time, Stieglitz was the most influential dealer of contemporary American non-representational art, at his gallery located at 291 Fifth Avenue.

"Stieglitz met the 'waggish unassuming boylike and curiously dignified Marin in June 1909 at his Paris studio... and in February 1910 his [Marin's] first one man exhibition at 291 took place, including pastels and etchings as well as watercolors" (Sarah Greenough, Modern Art and America: Alfred Stieglitz and his New York Galleries, 2001, p. 341). Marin returned to New York from Paris for good in 1910 and Stieglitz's extraordinary financial and psychological support surely provided both a safety net and an anchor for the artist.  Marin continued to exhibit at Stieglitz's galleries from 1909 until 1950 when his last gallery, An American Place, closed its doors.

As an American artist exploring national themes, Marin's intention was to establish a uniquely American style. His work focused on semi-abstract landscapes and cityscapes that were executed both as spontaneous plein air pieces and more carefully structured studio compositions.  While in New York, he attempted to capture the city's distinctive skyline of buildings and skyscrapers, its crowded streets and vibrating energy.  The rugged coast of Maine provided Marin with his most long lived subject; painting the ever changing ocean and coastal landscape every summer from 1914 until his death.

In Movement in Brown with Sun, one of Marin's rare efforts in oil during this period, he reduces the landscape to flattened abstract forms and angles creating outward directional force towards the edges of the composition. Stripped of referential color, with the exception of a vibrating red and yellow sun which floats in an empty unpainted sky, the landscape devolves into pure movement across the canvas. Marin cleverly contains the movement, keeping its energy inside the picture, by encasing it with an actual frame of pattern of regularly alternating color . As Kathleen Jameson notes, "the exposed patches of primed canvas that alternate with areas of pigment of varying thicknesses, [exploit] the interplay of negative and positive space and of recognizable and fragmented visual elements.  Through these devices, Marin communicates the concept of catching and interpreting a momentary glimpse of landscape and atmosphere... He also periodically extended his compositions out to the frames themselves, which he sometime painted and carved so that they functioned as integral elements of the paintings" (American Art Since 1900, p. 199).