John
Marin (1870 – 1953)
Marin was
educated at Hoboken Academy and Stevens Prep. He
was
sketching at 14 and painting sensitive watercolors at 15. His family
influenced
him to attend Stevens Insitute to become an architect. He opened an
office in
1893 but abandoned it to sketch and paint watercolors on his own. Marin
studied
at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Thomas Anshutz from 1899
to 1901,
but missed classes to sketch the city. From 1901 to 1903, he attended
the Art
Students League in New York City under DuMond, then worked as a
free-lance
architect while trying to resolve his light pattern technique by
painting 100
9x12” canvases in oils of the North River, the Palisades, and
Manhattan. In
1905, his family sent him to Europe
where
he studied
etching. When he
returned in 1909, he had his first one-man exhibition at Steiglitz’s
“291”
gallery. From that point he maintained his long span as the dean of
American
watercolor, the master of capturing the fluidity of motion and of the
simplifications of nature into semiabstract compositions.
Marin visited Taos the summers of 1929
and 1930 when
he was almost 60. The first exhibition of his Western watercolors was
an event
in 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art. His friends even
identified his
sites by means of a map that showed his haunts. Actually, he had
painted about
100 New Mexico watercolors without
any effect on
him that would compare to the impact of the West on Hartley. Marin’s
Taos
landscapes did not capture him, as did Maine. His Indians dancing
were
technically adept but not penetrating. More important to New Mexico art than Marin’s
watercolors,
however, was his influence. Along with Dasburg, he made modernism
acceptable in
this part of the Victorian West.
Resource: SAMUELS’ Encyclopedia of ARTISTS of THE AMERICAN WEST,
Peggy and Harold Samuels, 1985, Castle Publishing
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