Arts and Letters

John Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, on the 23rd of December, 1870, and lived the greater part of his life at a short distance from his birthplace. He died at the age of eighty-two at Cape Split, Addison, Maine, on October 1, 1953. His paternal great-grandfather, Jean-Baptiste Marin, came to this country from France, but he was of Spanish origin. His mother, who died when he was nine days old, was of English and Dutch stock.

John Marin was slow in coming to an assured realization of his calling, though he used to say that he had been drawing since the age of three. After attending the public schools at Weehawken he enrolled at Stevens Institute in Hoboken, where he prepared himself to be an architect. Indeed, he followed the profession of architect-contractor for a time, but was—as he put it—“no first-rate man." He began painting and from 1899 to 1901 his father supported him, first as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, then at the Art Students League in New York, where he worked principally under Frank Vincent Du Mond. "I must say," he wrote, "I derived very little from that period." In 1905 he went to Paris, but after two months he ceased attendance at the atelier which he had selected. He tells us he took walks in the country; he played billiards; he made several visits to the Louvre. Slowly, however, a confidence in painting landscapes "in his own way" began to assert itself. He exhibited ten water colors in the Autumn Salon of 1910. He was forty years old. Alfred Stieglitz had seen his work the year before and had returned to America to exhibit it in his now historic Photo-Secession Gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue. After six years in Paris, Marin returned to this country. His comment on the Paris years was that "in the water colors I had been making even before Stieglitz first saw my work, I had already begun to let go in complete freedom." We ourselves can see in the work to what extent this "complete freedom" was self-won. During those years in Paris he could have seen the painting of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Picasso, but he assures us that he did not. He was searching for his freedom within; it was only later, and to a limited extent, that his curiosities turned outward toward the work of other artists, discovering elements which he could assimilate to himself.

The forty-two years that followed on his return were devoted to confident and even joyous painting. Only occasionally do we find him under strain as he sought to break through into some new expansion of vision and expression. All his work he brought to Alfred Stieglitz and it was shown in the successive galleries wherein Stieglitz carried through to triumph his remarkable powers as a discoverer, inciter, and crusader of the new movement in American painting. Stieglitz shielded Marin from practical cares and distractions and opened his way to a life dedicated to painting alone. In 1912 Marin married Marie Jane Hughes, a neighbor in New Jersey; a son, John Marin, Junior, was born to them in 1914. Thereafter, he spent all his winters in a house he had bought in Cliffside, New Jersey; his summers in the Berkshires, the Adirondacks, the White Mountains, but with increasing frequency on the lower coast of Maine. In 1929 and 1930 he visited the Taos Valley in New Mexico.

Freedom is the name that every artist must give to his creation. It is a subjective attitude and in the cases of many greatly admired artists it is scarcely perceptible to us, so consistently and effortlessly does the work—that of a Vermeer, a Chardin, even a Raphael—seem to emerge from that of the contemporaries. It is apparent to all, however, that the freedom of Marin was hard-won. He takes his place in the line of authentic American autodidacts. The bolder the individual vision, the more slowly it is formed. Self-knowledge comes first through an uneasy repudiation of the contemporary performance; there is no precocious brilliance; each step must be taken in alternations of courage and self-doubt. Such was the early progress of Whitman and Melville and Thoreau. In their accounts of their development it is precisely the word "courage" which returns most frequently, and it is often accompanied by a smiling and unfrightened allusion to their work as "crazy." The statements which Marin furnished for the catalogues of his exhibitions were, like his letters, written in the ebullient American idiom: "So there now," he writes in 1922, "this is how I try to paint a picture, using to the best of my ability color and lines in their identity places. And there is the fellow up there in the sky who laughs, he who sheds tears, and the fellow who shouts at the top of his lungs, Courage! he the loudest of all." Three years before, he had written from Maine to Stieglitz: "Today I am an apostle of the crazy, but Damit, it's got to be a caged crazy, otherwise it would butt into another crazy."

This jubilation is reflected in many of the paintings. There is little that is somber or gloomy in the work of Marin, though he could seize the brooding majesty of the Indians' sacred mountain that rises above Taos or the menacing grandeur of a storm descending, in violent purple light, upon a forested height above Lake Champlain. It is in quickening energy that we must seek what Marin meant by "complete freedom."

The freedom that he won consisted, first, in releasing an inner compulsion to present a single subject, or a single aspect of the scene before him—what the eye sees in one deep gaze, not what the eye sees as it roams about the subject in ever-shifting focus. He was accustomed to say to younger artists who brought their work to him: "But you have there, on one canvas, three (or four or ten) pictures." As early as 1908 we see that Marin's instinct had prompted him to draw lines enclosing the central subject of his picture, painting an irregular frame well within the boundaries of his margin. This he called "bringing it forward." Later he was to do more: he isolated the central subject by setting it on an oblique plane, further cutting it off from its immediate surroundings. The effect is one of passionate appropriation of the thing seen. He seems to be saying: "What you see with an unwavering gaze has a reality which is lost when you permit your eye to rove over the scene and receive the succession of scores and hundreds of glances."

But this delight in devouring a single object had to be reconciled with a second urgency of his nature—a joy in orienting the object towards a total universe of light and space and air and forms. Particularly is this true when the chosen subject is not primarily an object or a form but one passage of color (Marin on his knees before one epiphany of color); for a color declares itself preeminently through a juxtaposition with color. The single gaze is not all-sufficient; we are not only Eye; we are aware of the universe by other organs, by the sense of balance and gravity. And for these ends the self-taught master evolved his own ways of indicating depth and luminosity and movement. There are pictures, for example, of a schooner dancing on the waves of a harbor in Maine. The ship is enclosed in a sort of parallelogram. Below it, in what is at first a disconcerting play of tilted planes, are suggestions of shore, fir trees, of white houses and a church steeple. And above the ship, in a rectangle, is a fragment only of the intense blue of the sky. These offer, indeed, the sum of several glances, but their separateness is stated with great candor; they are not merged, and the result is that the schooner, "brought forward," rides in our quickened imagination, sun-drunk and seaborne, sub specie aeternitatis.

Marin was once asked why some of his paintings were more "literal" than others. "Well, you see," he replied, "when I come into a new territory I paint what I see; when I've been there a while I paint what l know." It is well to remember that Marin painted "in series," making eight to a dozen paintings of the subject before him—a wind-twisted fir growing from between two ledges of rock; a row of yellowing cottonwood trees beside an arroyo in New Mexico; the Telephone and Telegraph Building seen from New York Harbor. It was his custom to keep his paintings by him for a year before he permitted them to be shown. During this year he gradually destroyed a number in each series. Perhaps no painter of his stature ever destroyed so many completed pictures.

Throughout his life Marin felt that painting in oil was as authentic an expression of his vision as painting in water color. The fact that he is generally known as a water-colorist is largely due to a particular intention on the part of Alfred Stieglitz. In the Western world water color has been widely associated with the preparatory sketch and the informal notation, whereas in the Orient it has served for centuries as the vehicle of the highest inspiration. Stieglitz wished to enlist Marin in his campaign to rehabilitate the water color as a major medium and Marin for a time permitted Stieglitz to focus this emphasis upon his work.

The great artist teaches us a new entrance into the visible world, a new homage and a new knowledge. Each of the master landscapists has informed our eyes: Turner taught us to see opalescence; Constable, the war of sun and cloud and wind and the white light that falls on tower and treetop; Poussin, the sovereign equalized light of noon or evening; Kokoschka, the geography, the geology, the history of the earth that lies behind the surface of city and valley; the Chinese masters, the landscape as background for a philosopher's meditation, itself fraught with the metaphysical implication of being and non-being; Hiroshige, a world accorded to the measure of man, lovingly, whisperingly, often drolly returning the love which he showers upon it. What is the overruling communication of John Marin?

Surely, we are still too near him to gather it from amid the rich diversity of his work. Yet one seems to be learning from him that the visible world is constantly speaking, is prompted by mind and energy; and this he conveys in the twentieth-century spirit, without the least resort to animism or anthropomorphism, without any imposing of our human "moods" upon the scene—by selfless gazing. From Marin's lyrical series of the flowering fruit-trees of New Jersey to the oil paintings of sea-surge and tumult, nature seems to have been caught surprised, in a world where no men are, eternally fulfilling itself in energy and beauty.

The New World is only beginning to receive that patina which generations of artists have conferred upon the Old, that of being greatly pictured, that ultimate reconciliation of man and his physical environment; and our gratitude to John Marin is doubled by this indebtedness to him as poet-painter of our land.