Out of the Dark Room

During his 83 years of life. Painter John Marin knew both popular and critical acclaim, but there were times when he felt a touch of bitterness. While the public and critics applauded his fluid watercolors, his oils were so assiduously ignored that Marin used to refer to his ever-increasing stock of unsold canvases as his "Dark Room Collection." Since his death in 1953. admirers have been trying to focus more light on the dark room. Their efforts came to a climax last week with the opening of a major Marin retrospective at the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C.* Of the 91 paintings on display, more than a third are oils, a medium in which the famed watercolorist was fully at home.

In many ways, it took Marin 40 years to find himself. Raised by two maiden aunts in Weehawken. N.J. (his mother died nine days after his birth), he attended Stevens Institute of Technology for a year, drifted from job to job, spent six frustrating years trying to turn himself into an architect. Finally, he went to Paris to study art--and in 1909 had the luck to meet Photographer Edward Steichen. As soon as Steichen got back to Manhattan, he showed a few Marin watercolors to his old friend Alfred Stieglitz, whose now legendary gallery was the first to show such men as Cezanne. Picasso and Matisse in the U.S. Marin took his place alongside them.

Golf Inside a Prism. In his early work, Marin seemed under the influence of Whistler, but he quickly acquired a stamp wholly his own. He was fascinated by force, energy, bustle and movement, and this obsession dictated a fresh technique.

The smooth surface of his watercolors began to crumple into fragments, as if each scene he painted had jumped inside a prism. Everything was recognizable, but everything was also slightly out of place, tipped or distorted to give a sense of motion. Of his watercolors, Marin insisted: "Painting is like golf; the fewer the strokes I take, the better the picture." But for all its spontaneity and frugality, the watercolor sometimes seemed too delicate.

It could catch a breeze or a mist; a storm demanded something more robust. The oils to which Marin turned retained the fluidity of his watercolors, but they often achieved a deeper intensity.

In Sea after Hurricane, finished in 1938, Marin showed the water still at boiling point but gave his textured waves a solidity that adds weight and menace to their churnings. In Morning Scene, painted eleven years later, Marin broke up the scene with bold black lines that are almost calligraphic. The mountains become a series of Ms; the harsh foreground is a powerful scribble. The right angle poised in the sky, while extending the mountainous skyline, also does a good deal more. It could symbolize a sail, a rainbow, or even the basic order lying beneath nature's turbulent surface. It is the first thing that catches the eye and is thus the gateway to the entire composition.

"God Be Praised!" "Seems to me," said Marin. "the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the elemental big forms--sky, sea. mountain, plain--to sort of re-true himself up, to recharge the battery. But to express these, you have to love these, to be a part of these in sympathy." Marin's sympathy lasted to the end. From his home in Cape Split, Me., he dashed off one of his last notes to a friend just when nature was erupting all around him. "The Hurricane has just hit," he said. "The Seas are Glorious--Magnificent--Tremendous. God be praised that I have yet the vision to see these things."

* After which it will go to the Currier Gallery of Art in Manchester, N.H., whose director, Charles E. Buckley, was largely responsible for assembling the paintings.

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