John Marin: Weehawken
Title
Subject
Description
Oil on panel, 9.25 x 12 inches
Signed verso "Painted between 1903-1904/John Marin"
John Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey in 1870. In addition to attending public school in Weehawken, New Jersey, Marin's other schooling included Hoboken Academy, Stevens Preparatory, and the Stevens Institute. He worked in an architecture firm for four years and was a free lance architect for one year. He then spent two years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia (with Thomas Anschutz and William Merritt Chase from 1899-1901) and one year at the Arts Students League, New York (1902-03). Inspired by Whistler, Marin went to Paris in the summer of 1905, where he briefly attended the Academie Julian, and stayed abroad for four years visiting Amsterdam and the Belgium coast, Italy (Rome, Florence, and Venice), London, Bruges, Antwerp, and Brussels. In 1907 his oil painting The Mills at Meaux was purchased by the French government for the Luxembourg Museum. He continued to produce etchings (103 while in Paris) and oils (exhibited paintings in the Salon des Independents) and also watercolors. When he returned to the United States in, Marin's career was launched before the American people when he exhibited his watercolors at Stieglitz's gallery, "291" in New York. Marin went back to Europe one last time in the spring of 1910 where he painted in the Tyrol, returning to the U.S. in 1911. He married in 1912 and after living in Brooklyn and New York, moved to Cliffside, New Jersey in 1916. He spent his summers in Maine, Massachusetts, New York, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and New Mexico. Marin died in Cape Splint, Maine in October 1953. John Marin's original and bold fluid style earned him a place as one of America's greatest early modernists.
In his lifetime, John Marin's works were exhibited frequently in major exhibitions and museum retrospectives. Among these were the Armory Show in 1913; Museum of Modern Art in 1936; Boston Institute of Contemporary Art; Walker Art Center in 1947; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Santa Barbara Museum; Los Angeles Museum of Art in 1949; Munson-Williams Proctor Institute in 1951, and the Houston Museum of Fine Arts in 1953. Marin's works continue to be exhibited and are represented in the important collections of the United States.
John Marin produced his famous Weehawken series from 1903-1904, which consisted of about a hundred small oil paintings on canvas board. Marin, himself, dated these works and they related to his life at that time. Ranging from a daring representational style to almost complete abstraction, they anticipate the later work of the Fauves and abstract art.
Image provided by Willie Demontreux.
Thanks to Bernie Zempolich for this link!