Prof. Francesco Carelli

 

Watercolour – Brooklin’s bridge

John Marin (1870 – 1953) was an early American modernist artist. He is known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors. In 1905, like many American artists Marin went to Europe and he mastered a type of watercolour where he achieved an abstract ambience, almost a pure abstraction with colour that ranges from transparency to translucency, accompanied by strong opacities, and linear elements, always with a sense of freedom, which became one of his trademarks.

In 1909, Marin held his first one-man exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery in New York City. He had been introduced to Stieglitz by the photographer Edward Steichen, whom Marin in turn had met through the painter Arthur B. Carles. Marin’s association with Stieglitz would last nearly forty years, and Stieglitz’s philosophical and financial support would prove essential. From 1909 until his death in 1946, Stieglitz showed Marin’s work almost every year in one of his galleries.

Late in life Marin achieved tremendous prestige as an American painter, an elder statesman of American art. In 1950, he was honoured by the University of Maine and Yale University with honorary degrees of Doctor of Fine Arts. John Marin was among the first American artists to make abstract paintings. Marin is often credited with influencing the Abstract Expressionists. His treatment of paint—handling oils almost like watercolors—his forays into abstraction, and his use of evocative stretches of bare canvas caught the eye of younger painters. His experience with architecture might have contributed to the role played by architectural themes in his paintings and watercolors.

Marin’s paintings are also represented in several important permanent collections and museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art and the Phillips Collection, both in Washington, D.C., the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, New Hampshire, and many others. The White House acquired his 1952 painting The Circus No. 1 in 1962, <“Art in The White House A Nation’s Pride”, White House Historical Association, 2008.>, and it is now displayed in the Green Room.