Golfer with a Brush

For almost 20 years, art critics have persistently called John Marin the best living U.S. watercolorist. Last week Marin's first retrospective show since 1936 showed why.

The exhibition, in Boston's Institute of Modern Art, included about a hundred water colors, oils, etchings from Marin's sizable output (he averages 30 or 40 water colors a year).* Most were balanced skeins of color which caught, as if in shorthand, the feel of Marin's Maine and Manhattan. The best of them, which had the lift and sparkle of a sunny day at sea, looked as if they had taken a couple of minutes to paint. "It is like golf," Marin once explained. "The fewer strokes I can take, the better the picture."

In a revealing foreword to the show's catalogue, Critic MacKinley Helm described how he had watched Marin turn a sunset into a painting. Wrote Helm: "With his right hand [Marin] roughed in with black crayon the three elements of the picture--sky, headland and bay; and laid on the color with furious strokes of a half-inch brush in his left hand. His hands fought each other over the paper. . . . 'See that blue spot out there?' Marin said, dabbing impatiently. . . . 'You can't put it on paper--so you just put down a color that the paper will like, a color that looks all right in itself. If the paper likes it, it doesn't matter if it's not a transcript of nature.'"

For Marin, one of the few problems in painting is balance. "Think of the wonderful balance of squirrels," he told Helm. "They scratch themselves equally well with hind paws or fore paws without losing their balance. I like my pictures to have that kind of balance. ... I stand them up on their end, turn them upside down, until I see that, like the squirrels, they have got balance in every direction."

At 76, Marin is a flowing-haired nature-lover who has no interest in transcribing nature, and a modern artist who finds himself "completely unsympathetic with cubism or other forms of abstraction, or with surrealism. I belong to no ism. I haven't the time. Shakespeare belonged to no ism." When a reporter cornered the old, thin man at the opening of his Boston show to ask who were his favorite painters, wry, shy John Marin had his answer ready: "Myself."

* About 500 Marin pictures are in museums or private collections. Another 150 are tied up in the estate of famed Photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who discovered Marin. Marin himself has between 500 and 1,000. His good oils bring $4,000 or more; the best water colors, from $2,500 up.

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