Word: marin
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Portugal, Ireland, Brazil, South Africa and Colombia were all on hand for the first time. Germany and Yugoslavia (but none of the Soviet satellites) were back for the first time since the war. From the U.S. had come a retrospective showing of 48 paintings by Seascapist John Marin, along with samplings of six younger-and lesser-U.S. artists (TIME, June 12). Surveying that bewildering array, one British critic moaned: "They have collected too much art. Too many impressions are fighting each other...
...pavilion's better half was devoted to John Marin, a wry, shy old crow of a man who paints nature as knowingly as Winslow Homer and with even greater freedom (TIME, Jan. 9). As Washington's Duncan Phillips put it in the exhibition catalogue, Marin "is one of the most gifted and important painters since Cezanne and perhaps the best of all masters of watercolor. An individualist and mostly self-taught and indifferent to theories, he sought at the outset of his career for abbreviated personal symbols of color and line-a green triangle for a pine...
Barr and Frankfurter had picked examples of the latest U.S. art fashions to export to Venice. Old John Marin, who sniffs at both abstractionism and expressionism, was the one painter in the U.S. pavilion whose reputation would clearly survive fashion...
None of the younger men's watercolors could match those exhibited by oldtimers Charles Burchfield and John Marin, but there were a few that came close. Dong Kingman's rich, elaborate House Boat, an artful jumble of calligraphs set in perspective, was lively and bright as a flag-draped avenue on a windy day. Lawrence Kupferman's luminous underwater abstraction, Genesis of Growth, had all the minute fascination of a rocky tide pool...
...spindly, sharp-beaked crow of a man who spends his winters near Rutherford, N.J., where he was born, Marin has always loved solitude and the sea. His letters to his friend and sponsor, the late great photographer Alfred Stieglitz, were often signed "The Ancient Marin-er." They spoke most of the weather, and mentioned fishing, berrying and hunting as often as art. One such letter, written five years ago, hints at the bigness and joy that the old man still puts in his paintings...