Marin in Watercolor
The exhibition John Marin and the Critics at Menconi + Schoelkopf is on view virtually through July 31
22 E. 80th Street
New York, NY 10075 t: (212) 879-8815 www.msfineart.com
John Marin began his career with a series of celebrated etchings but soon established himself as a watercolorist.the frenetic line of his etchings migrated to the new medium, and he soon added to his calligraphy a bold, expressive coloration that would inform his work for the rest of his career.at the same time, he was exploring watercolor, Marin also began working in oil, but this experimental phase was limited, and, likely at his dealer’s suggestion, not exhibited at the time.watercolor would remain his favored medium for the rest of his life—partly for his brilliance in the fast-drying medium, partly for the ease with which he could carry it along the rugged coastline of Maine which he soon adopted as his favorite painting locale. It was a tool that brought him “just short of abstraction,” just as the Weehawken Sequence had in oil.according to Sheldon Cheney’s A Primer of Modern Art:“marin has given me more pure aesthetic enjoyment than anything I have ever seen of Kandinsky’s. He stops just short of abstraction.very few painters dare go so far toward it. Cézanne did in his watercolors. In them he seems to bare his painter’s soul more easily than he did in oils.”
Critics disagreed across his lifetime about whether he was better in oil or watercolor, but all confirmed that his experiments in watercolor informed his undeniable greatness in oil:“those who have long recognized Marin as one of America’s finest water-colorists were skeptical, or even looked with alarm upon his determination not to be tied to a single medium, the results in oil are beginning to tell,” Edward Alden Jewell wrote for The New York Times in 1932. For a while, in the late 1930s, the watercolors were more carefully composed and tightly structured than the oils, but by the early
1940s the extraordinary freedom and expressiveness are to be found consistently in both media.this was a change of which Marin was obviously aware, as he observed in 1947 that “using paint as paint is
Menconi + Schoelkopf