ART REVIEW : Marin: Early Modernist Recaptures the Spotlight

The critic Clement Greenberg, writing of John Marin in 1948, said, “If it is not beyond all doubt that he is the best painter alive in America at this moment, he assuredly has to be taken into consideration when we ask who is.”

The same year, a survey of art professionals taken by Look magazine deemed Marin the most popular painter in the country. Yet by the time of his death in 1953, the renowned watercolorist’s reputation was fading, eclipsed first by the heroics of Abstract Expressionism, then by the cool and irony of Pop and Minimalism. Marin came to join the broken ranks of such once-vaunted modernists as Georges Rouault and Raoul Dufy.

Now Marin is back, up for re-evaluation at the National Gallery in a comprehensive 125-work survey, the first in a quarter-century. Organized by curator Ruth E. Fine and on view to April 15, it will not travel. In substance, it ranges through etchings of crystallized cathedrals, watercolors of animated skyscrapers, liquefied landscapes and late oil paintings that seem to glance over their shoulder at Jackson Pollock.

It’s really an old story. Every art movement is like a wave building to break on the beach. Artists slide into the curl like surfers swept up by momentum that is part fashion, part history. The wave crests, crashes and fades, dragging some riders under, leaving a few bobbing on their boards in calm triumph.

Marin rode the first surge of modernism in America among artists magnetized around the photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz. His contemporaries included Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and others sometimes known as “The Immaculates.”

Today we see something exquisite in Marin’s art, and that comes as a surprise. The artist was born in 1870 in Rutherford, N.J. His mother died only a few days later and his father traveled constantly on business, so the new baby was raised by his grandparents. By available accounts, it was a happy childhood and Marin--after a short career as an architect--made essentially happy art . . . happy, but animated by a nervous, staccato rhythm that also marks the free verse the artist wrote and gave character by odd line breaks that are very like the short, calligraphic strokes of his painting.

Marin’s rhythm and patterning remain his main strengths, bringing a kind of American beat to art that otherwise might be . . . what? To some extent, Marin’s career was one long act of avoidance. He studied in Europe beginning in 1905 during the thick of the modernist revolution but apparently avoided Picasso and the crowd around Gertrude Stein, hanging out instead with an American expatriate contingent that included Patrick Henry Bruce, Max Weber and Alfred Maurer. His work was shown in tandem with Cezanne and Matisse but he later professed to not know their art.

Back home he dodged the European connection, styling himself as a Maine Yankee loner, talking salty and down-home in accents of pithy wit, shrewd but uncultivated. He smoked cigarettes, played billiards and said things like, “They do have mosquitoes here and this house is full of them but they have nets over all the beds this is very good as it don’t allow the pests to get outside the nets.”

Real earthy. Of course, he wrote it from Amsterdam and the lack of punctuation does recall Stein.

Artists have been managing their images since time immemorial, so the fact that Marin manipulated his is not as important as what he was trying accomplish by it. My guess is that he wanted to broadcast the archetype of an artist of such candor and naivete that everything he did must be original even when it happened to accidentally look a little like somebody else.

In fact, Marin did develop an unmistakable trademark style but its underpinning was not slangy native inventiveness: It was cautious, cultivated, cosmopolitan absorption.

Early views of Paris cathedrals and Venetian canals are decidedly Whistlerian. Soon he established the open brushwork and mouthwatering color that probably came from Matisse and the Fauves but is so reserved and witty it recalls Bonnard. Later, a Weehawken grain elevator has been cranked through Cubism and the Woolworth Building arrives in Manhattan via Italian Futurism. But even with epic subject matter, Marin remains an intimist. Marin was prolific, inventive and energetic. Every picture sings. He introduced interior painted frames and elaborated exterior frames. He journeyed from Maine to Taos to Manhattan and Cape Cod for varied inspiration but the work evolves so slowly it never really seems to change. It lacks punctuating masterpieces and, aside from its nervous lyricism, has very little emotion. It was a rare day when a work like the 1937 “Wave on a Rock” came close to the metaphysical brooding of a Homer or Ryder.

Marin brought some of the detachment of traditional Chinese ink landscape to the hectic dynamic of the 20th Century. In the end, his art seems to hint at Abstract Expressionism, but not in its period of raw, gutsy breakthrough. Marin looked like the beautiful second-generation long before it existed.

In the end, this is an art of pleasure and tastefulness that is more like modern classical chamber music than jazz. It brings to mind great decorators like Matisse, Braque or even David Hockney.

The truth is that the wave ridden by Marin and his generation was not the Big One. Their contribution is deservedly secure but their circumstances somewhat circumscribed as that which occured just before it all really happened.