John Marin

(American, 1870–1953)

John Marin was a seminal American modernist painter. He was one of the first Americans to employ techniques of abstraction in his calligraphic depictions of landscapes and city streets, as seen in his work Bryant Square (1932). Along with Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, and Georgia O’Keeffe, Marin helped introduce a new aesthetic model for American painters. “I must for myself insist that when finished, that is when all the parts are in place and are working, that now it has become an object and will therefore have its boundaries as definite as the prow, the stern, the sides, and bottom bound as a boat,” he once reflected. Born on December 23, 1870 in Rutherford, NJ, Marin started his career in art later in life, graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1901 at the age of 30. In 1905, he travelled to Europe, where he developed his signature watercolor technique and met the artist Edward Steichen. It was Steichen that introduced his work to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who mounted Marin’s first solo show in 1909, and financially supported the artist over the remainder of his career. Marin died on October 2, 1953 in Addison, ME. Today, his works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.