Esteemed for his lyrical watercolor style, John Marin was one of few American modernists to achieve widespread recognition in the years before the rise of Abstract Expressionism. Born in Rutherford, New Jersey, Marin turned to painting after a brief stint as an architect. Enrolling in courses at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1899, Marin remained there for two years before completing his American training at the Art Students League of New York. In 1905 he departed for Paris, where he lived with his stepbrother and immersed himself in the city's avant-garde art scene. During this period, Marin gradually abandoned his earlier Impressionist style for a bolder approach characterized by arbitrary color and a free handling of form that bordered on abstraction. Marin's style brought him to the attention of early modernist impresario Alfred Stieglitz (q.v.), whose New York gallery 291 hosted Marin's first one-person show in March 1909.

Marin's watercolors were well received, and in 1911 the artist returned permanently to the United States. Settling in Brooklyn, he began to depict urban views, including such notable landmarks such the Brooklyn Bridge and the Woolworth Building. Always a central component of his oeuvre, landscape subjects assumed new importance after Marin discovered Maine in 1914. During the decade, Marin joined the front ranks of the American avant-garde, sending works to important modernist venues including the Armory Show of 1913 and the Forum Exhibition of Modern American Painters, held at New York's Anderson Galleries in 1916. Marin's work became increasingly expressionistic during the 1920s yet retained its basis in the seen object. Despite turning to oils in the 1930s and experimenting with gestural abstraction toward the end of his life, Marin had, by the time of his 1936 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, become indelibly associated with his vaporous and delicately lyrical works of the 1910s and 1920s. Considered a living old master at the time of his death, Marin remains among the key figures in the history of American modernism.

Marin's images of the Maine coast are among the artist's most representative works. After spending his first summer in the town of Westpoint, Marin returned almost every year thereafter until his death in 1953. For many summers he resided in the small coastal communities of Small Point and Stonington, which furnished subjects for much of his best work of the 1910s and 1920s.

The Currier's Five Islands, Stonington reveals Marin's talent for infusing a modernist aesthetic with a sensitivity of feeling that won many admirers. Rendered in muted shades of freely brushed watercolor, Five Islands is a panoramic view of rocky islets and pine-studded coastal bluffs. Although nature predominates, details such as the small house near the bottom center and a sailboat add a human note, lending narrative interest and establishing the scale of the scene. Deliberately blurred and distorted, the image seems something remembered or dreamed rather than observed. Poetic in mood, it tells the viewer as much about the artist's mindset as about his subject.

Conveying inner feeling was Marin's primary goal as a painter. To that end, he first absorbed Impressionism and then various avant-garde movements ranging from Symbolism to Fauvism, Cubism, and Expressionism. Among Marin's most significant achievements was his ability to synthesize elements from disparate movements to create his own aesthetic. In Five Islands, Stonington, the atmospheric breadth of the scene recalls Impressionism, yet the subjective rendering of form and color is more akin to the Fauvism of Henri Matisse (1869-1954). Spontaneous, angular brushstrokes in certain passages seem to invoke German Expressionism, yet they lack that movement's brooding and violent emotionalism. Together, the influences present in Five Islands coalesce in an image suffused with breezy calm and quiet exultation.

Five Islands, Stonington was given to the Currier Museum of Art in 1964 by photographer Paul Strand (q.v.) and his wife, Hazel.

VSD

REFERENCES

"A Watercolor by John Marin." Currier Gallery of Art Bulletin, February 1964, n.p.

John Marin 1870-1953. Ex. cat. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1970.

John Marin: Watercolors, Oil Paintings, Etchings. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966.