AFA 18th Anniversary

18th Anniversary 120 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com text continues on page 127 Modernist at Work J ohn Marin (1870–1953), one of America’s best known and most admired modern artists, specialized in watercolors and etchings of New York City and the coast of Maine. Yet many of his works have remained unpublished and unseen. In 2013, Norma B. Marin, the artist’s daughter-in-law, gave the Arkansas Arts Center a generous selection of 290 drawings and watercolors that had been preserved in the artist’s estate. Completed watercolors are included in the collection, along with a plethora of sketches and unfinished watercolors not previously shown or published. Now these works can shine. The John Marin Collection of the Arkansas Arts Center debuts in the exhibition Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work , opening at the Arts Center on January 26, 2018. The exhibition invites visitors to look over the artist’s shoulder at the process of creation. It brings together drawings and watercolors from the collection with art works on loan from other institutions, reuniting sketches with related watercolors, etchings, or oil paintings, often for the first time outside the artist’s studio. New Jersey was Marin’s home for most of his life; he was born in Rutherford, the son of a travelling salesman who was seldom home. Young John was raised by his grandparents and two aunts who allowed him many unsupervised hours roaming the countryside with a pencil and a sketchbook. Marin recalled, “I just drew. I drew every chance I got.” 1 It was always clear that Marin was an artist, but how he could best make a living was long a question. He tried studying engineering and apprenticing to be an architect. After designing a few houses, he turned to studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and then at the Art Students League in New York. In 1905, Marin moved to Paris, where he made picturesque etchings for the tourist trade. It was while he was chafing at the restrictions of such commercial work that he encountered American photographer and painter Edward Steichen, who was a sort of talent scout for Alfred Stieglitz’s groundbreaking exhibitions of modern art at 291, his gallery in New York City. Steichen instantly recognized Marin’s original artistic genius, which he enthusiastically communicated to Stieglitz. 2 Once Stieglitz had seen Marin’s watercolors and etchings, he added the budding American modernist to the stable he was creating of American modernists like Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley, whose work he exhibited regularly at 291. Stieglitz continued to feature these artists in his later modernist galleries, The Intimate Gallery and An American Place. With the support of Stieglitz, Marin established himself as a leading American modernist. The mature Marin divided his time between his home in Cliffside, New Jersey, and rural vacation locations mostly in Maine. His favorite subjects for watercolors and etchings featured New York’s rising skyscrapers and the glorious meeting of land and sea along the coast of Maine. Throughout Marin’s career, the artist drew continually. His graphic style varied depending upon whether he was gathering literal visual information, responding to figures in motion, creating a composition, testing out approaches to abstraction, or just drawing for the pure joy of it. Drawing lay behind or within all his completed art works. It is this relationship that viewers can explore in Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work . by Ann Prentice Wagner Becoming John Marin