Word: mariners
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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THIS typically modest saying of John Marin's contrasts sharply with the spirit surrounding the huge retrospective show held in his honor at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts last week. "You are opening this book," the exhibition catalogue grandly announces, "because John Marin was a great artist." Few self-appointed priests of art would disagree with the judgment, particularly in view of the fact that the word great has become considerably devalued by excessive use. Mann, who died less than two years ago, at 82, is generally ranked with Winslow Homer as a painter of the nation...
...haired and sharp-beaked, Mann was as pithy and angular in speech and gesture as in his paintings. He never cottoned to the art of his contemporaries, went his own way slowly. At about 40 he hit his peak, and never came down from it. The last half of Marin's life was mounting triumph. He divided it between New Jersey winters and Maine coast summers (except for two excursions to New Mexico), devoted it to painting pictures that were not so much windows on nature as calculated explosions of sea, sun and open air. He worked fast, using...
...disappointments of Marin's life was the fact that his oils never caught on as well as his watercolors did. As if to atone for that, Boston's show includes no fewer than 40 oils. They are a bit stiff compared with the watercolors, but examples like the Seascape Fantasy (right) have a richness that only oils can give...
...exhibit came close to being a Who's Who of American painting, sweeping from Charles Willson Peale, the academy's founder, and Benjamin West (first honorary member) to the Maine water-colors of the late (1953) John Marin. Included were the works of such figures as George Caleb Bingham, Mary Cassatt (only U.S. painter of the French impressionist movement), the meticulous realist William Harnett, and five artists of the famed "Ashcan School" of realism-Robert Henri, George Luks, Everett Shinn, John Sloan and William Glackens. Before the exhibition was under way, the U.S. Information Agency began making plans...
...diverted him from the ranks of dull respectability. Sparked by the ideas of the cubists and the fauves, he came home to join the circle of young pioneers around the great photographer and art impresario, Alfred Stieglitz. Already in Stieglitz' stable were Alfred Maurer, Arthur Carles, John Marin, Marsden Hartley and Max Weber. They all knew they were good, though the public had no inkling...