Word: mariners
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
That conviction makes him impatient with "expressionist" painting that springs only from imagination. "An idiot surely puts himself into what he does," Marin says, and adds, "the high priest of art don't give a damn who did it." He has even less sympathy for "nonobjective" painters who substitute dead geometry for breathing life...
Curiously, Marin's own pictures are self-expressive and abstract. He usually lets the straight lines and angles that are the scaffolding of his compositions stand in the finished work, and prefers a careless-seeming blot of color to a smooth wash. "The very doing" of a picture, he believes, is part of what the picture has to say, so he makes his paintings look like works-in-progress...
Break the Glass. At first glance the effect is one of sketchiness, but at second it is something altogether different. Many painted landscapes look as if they had been laboriously traced on a pane of glass set between the artist and the scene. Marin's method breaks the glass and lets daylight and fresh air flood...
...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...