JO H N MA R I N the weehawken sequence
JO H N MA R I N the weehawken sequence
essay by klaus kertess
Meredith Ward Fine Art 44 east 74th street suite 1 new york ny 10021 tel 212 744 7306 info@meredithwardfineart.com
Weehawken Sequence, c. -
oil on canvas board5, x inches 4
Preface In 1904, the New York Central Railroad completed construction on an enormous terminal freight yard, including a new grain elevator of the most advanced design, on the west shore of the Hudson River at Weehawken, New Jersey. John Marin (-), who had grown up nearby and had trained as an architect, was immediately drawn to this feat of modern industrial engineering. In he produced his earliest painting of the grain elevator—a watercolor—before heading off to Europe in the autumn of . Back in the United States in , Marin again turned his attention to the bustling Hudson River waterfront, applying the artistic breakthroughs he had made in Europe to this quintessentially American scene. Thus began the series of revolutionary small oils known today as The Weehawken Sequence. We are thrilled to present this selection of works from the series, many of which have never before been shown. Their variety is extraordinary, encompassing natural and industrial imagery, in palettes varying from muted tones to vibrant hues, and compositions ranging from gestural views of the bustling railroad yards to atmospheric abstractions of the river and sky. As a group, they anticipate much of what was to come in Marin’s work, as well as the work of many artists who came after him. I am enormously grateful to Norma B. Marin, the artist’s daughter-in-law, for her ongoing support and enthusiasm, and for so generously sharing her knowledge of Marin’s work. My appreciation goes also to Klaus Kertess, who was among the first art historians to focus specifically on Marin’s work in oil in his landmark exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum, Marin in Oil. He has written a fascinating essay that explores this still overlooked aspect of Marin’s work, putting it into historical context and explaining its far-reaching significance. Finally, thanks go to Hilary Goldsmith for her diligent work overseeing all aspects of the catalogue and exhibition.
Meredith E. Ward There has been considerable discussion as to the dating of The Weehawken Sequence. Today, the general consensus among scholars is that the Weehawken oils were almost certainly produced in the years after Marin’s return from Europe in . In his catalogue raisonné on the artist, Sheldon Reich assigned the entire group to . However, as Ruth Fine has pointed out, the diversity of the works suggests that they were more likely created over a period of several years.1 We have therefore dated all of the works in this exhibition to the six-year period between and . All works are from the artist’s estate. 1. See Sheldon Reich, John Marin: A Stylistic Analysis and Catalogue Raisonne (), vol. 1, pp. and Ruth E. Fine, John Marin (, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), pp. -.
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Weehawken Sequence, c. -
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The Weehawken Se quence By Klaus Kertess John Marin often referred to himself as The Ancient Mariner; however, he might well have meant a navigator of paint more than of the seas. In the course of his career, in both watercolor and oil, Marin reveled in urging his medium to roll and break like ocean waves, to flutter like windswept foliage, to bring to life distant mountains, to make as clearly visible the process of his making as the forming of his subject. “In painting water, make the hand move the way the water moves,” Marin wrote in a 1923 letter to Alfred Stieglitz. And, indeed, he seems to have been able to make his hand move like water. The dynamic ebb and flow of his paint, now nearly abstract, now clearly embodying some aspect of nature looked forward to Jackson Pollock’s epic flung and dripped, allover abstractions begun in the late 1940s. Alfred Stieglitz the intrepid impresario of American modernism’s first round, promoted Marin as a master of watercolor and America’s number one painter; and it would be Marin whom Pollock would have to supersede, in the eyes of such as Clement Greenberg. The exhibition that this text accompanies is comprised of 32 small paintings on canvasboard (all ca. 9 x 12 inches) that are part of the some 100 paintings created c. -16 in what has come to be known as The Weehawken Sequence. All of them were painted in plein air, as was Marin’s wont. These paintings, moving freely into and out of abstraction, are a laboratory testing the limits and abilities of oil paint—its viscosity, density, luminosity, elasticity, flexibility—its soul. Taken as a whole, this group represents a singular and audacious moment in the development of modernism; and it provided the foundation for Marin’s turn to oil painting, which would become his primary medium, in the 1930s, although he never abandoned the medium of watercolor. Before turning to the Weehawken Sequence, an account of Marin’s beginnings is in order.
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Marin grew up in Weehawken, New Jersey across the Hudson River from Manhattan. From 1899 to 1901 he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts. He left the Academy with a love of Homer and Whistler both of whose art, especially that of Whistler, would influence him for some years to come. Like so many younger American artists he decided to spend time in Paris and arrived in September of 1905. That year Matisse, Andre Derain, and Maurice Vlaminck took the Salon d’Automne by storm with their paintings’ chromatic fireworks, broken contours and pared down representation. Les Fauves (Wild Beasts) they were labeled. While there is no record of Marin’s response, the influence of Matisse would slowly percolate in his head, while for some time Homer’s and Whistler’s influence would continue. In Marin was included in the Salon d’Automne together with Patrick Henry Bruce and Max Weber; his work was still influenced by Whistler, as well as the French etcher Charles Meryon. However, by Marin’s watercolors would begin to exhibit the kind of staccato brushwork and incomplete contours so typical of Matisse’s work begun in . That same year Marin became a founding member of Edward Steichen’s New Society of American Artists in Paris that also included Patrick Henry Bruce, Arthur B. Carles, Alfred Maurer, and Max Weber. Steichen acted as Alfred Stieglitz’s talent scout and quickly promoted Marin to him, resulting in an exhibition together with Alfred Maurer at Stieglitz’s , in New York, in . When Marin returned to the United States in , he had his first one-person exhibition at . By Marin was painting a kind of dynamic liquefied Cubism making every stubby brushstroke vividly visible in his stunning watercolor portraits of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Woolworth building that looked as though Robert Delaunay had joined the Fauves. And, in an early oil painting Autumn, Castorland painted in , Marin unfurled a panoply of festive hues, short scattered brushstrokes and broken tree contours that clearly call to Matisse in . Painting in oil would be sporadic until the s, when oil would become Marin’s preferred medium and the ocean his most frequent subject. Oil, of course, is a more suitable medium to deal with the depth and movement of the ocean than is watercolor; and after buying a house
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Weehawken Sequence, c. -
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Weehawken Sequence, c. -, oil on canvas board, x inches Weehawken Sequence, c. -, oil on canvas board, x inches 10
in Cape Split, Maine, in , after many years of summering in Maine, the ocean dominated Marin’s brushstrokes. Ocean and revelation of process became one. Stieglitz would continue to promote Marin as a watercolorist—“probably the world’s foremost watercolorist,” he wrote in the catalogue for Marin’s exhibition. And, indeed, critics and curators continued to privilege the watercolors over the oils. It wasn’t until , four years after Stieglitz’s death and three years before Marin’s death that he had his first all-oil painting exhibition at An American Place, the gallery Stieglitz had opened in . Turning back now to the Weehawken Sequence paintings, we are immediately confronted with an unbridled freedom—anything goes, resolution is not an issue, indeed should be avoided. These paintings were made outdoors, from the Weehawken side of the Hudson, frequently looking across to Manhattan’s skyscrapers. In one of the most abstract and freest of these views (. ), tonalities of sky and water merge and something vaguely buildings-like hovers at the bottom edge of the canvas—a kind of geometric grouping in the center and a hulking, chimney-topped building, almost like a geometricized top half of a human, hovering to the right. Strokes, now thick, now thin, now in blurry rectangularity, now long and drawn out across the sky, here and there squiggles of what is likely to be the top, pointed end of the brush making linear scrapes through the wet paint—no interest in finish, and yet it all glows with a joyous atonality (mixed metaphors seem to be in order here). A more recognizable cityscape (. ) is created almost exclusively out of rectangles ranging from short, stubby strokes to large congregations of rectangles not quite congealing into skyscrapers—as though adrift on the Hudson River. Here Marin seems to have urbanized Matisse’s staccato strokes enveloping his landscapes. A still more abstracted view (. ) cascades downward in a torrent of strokes barely contained by the sturdier, horizontal bunching of rectangles at the bottom of the vertical plane. Throughout his painting career Marin forswore abstraction; nonetheless he often pushed his painterly representation to the edge of abstraction—and occasionally went all the way, as can be seen in a
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Weehawken Sequence, c. -
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number of his Weehawken Sequence paintings. In one such painting (. ), a viscerally painted rocklike formation rumbles across the lower third of the horizontal plane and is topped, first, by an outburst of khaki strokes, then a cloud of horizontal blue strokes. This kind of protoGuston s abstraction is interrupted on the right by a congregation of thin squiggly strokes in the awkward process of congealing into the branches of a leafless tree that tentatively pushes the plane into representation of a landscape. In a painting (. ) that might as readily be read horizontally as vertically, a kind of slow motion eruption of lush, umbel strokes in a kind of variegated Mattissian drag cheerfully defies any kind of representational resolution and fastforwards to the threshold of Abstract Expressionism. Few, if any of Marin’s peers gave such gutsy physicality to his or her joy in painting. Few are likely to have had as direct an effect on the epic abstraction created by such as Pollock and de Kooning in the 1950’s. In 1986, while working on an exhibition exclusively devoted to Marin’s oil paintings, I called Elaine de Kooning and asked about her and her husband Willem’s response to Marin’s paintings of the 1940s. “Marin was the American painter we most admired,” she responded.
1. Dorothy Norman, ed., The Selected Writings of John Marin, , New York, Pellegrini & Cudahy, p.
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Grain Elevator, c. -, oil on canvas board, ¼ x ⅝ inches Grain Elevator, c. -, oil on canvas board, ¼ x ½ inches 14
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published in conjunction with the exhibition
JOHN MARIN the weehawken sequence February – March 12,
Meredith Ward Fine Art 44 east 74th street suite 1 new york new york 10021 tel 212 744 7306 fax 212 744 7308 info @ meredithwardfineart.com www. meredithwardfineart.com
design The Grenfell Press, New York printing Permanent Printing, Ltd., Hong Kong photography Joshua Nefsky, New York edition of 1500 cover () Weehawken Sequence, c. -
oil on canvas board, x ¾ inches frontispiece Weehawken Sequence, c. -
oil on canvas board, ¼ x ½ inches publication copyright © meredith ward fine art essay copyright © klaus kertess
Meredith Ward Fine Art 44 east 74th street suite 1 new york ny 10021 tel 212 744 7306 info@meredithwardfineart.com