Fugues in Space

By ROBERT HUGHES

A few years before he died in 1953 at the age of 83, John Marin was voted "the greatest living American painter" by a poll of critics and museum men. What the cranky, salt-bitten old Yankee thought of this honor is uncertain. Marin loathed the idea that art should become a monument, freezing its maker in the pose of a culture hero. "Art is not great," he once scribbled in that looping hand with which he covered innumerable scraps of paper with misspelled, queerly punctuated aphorisms. "Music is not great. It's just that they tickle us. When one steadfastly refuses greatness--then and then only can the wonderful thing we call art be created." And again: "Art is just a series of natural gestures. For God's sake, don't try to be artistic--all wild animals walk the same way."

But in the event, Marin's immediate posterity did not treat him kindly, and his reputation slipped after his death. The U.S. public was, understandably perhaps, far more interested in the New York School, which had rewritten the terms of international art, than in Marin, who had not. To celebrate the 100th anniversary of Marin's birth in 1870, the Los Angeles County Museum has assembled a full-dress retrospective of his work (more than 150 oils, watercolors and drawings), which opens this week at New York's Whitney Museum. It offers fresh insights on this persistently underrated artist.

Written Paint. With hindsight, it is difficult to look at the broad, loosely brushed planes of primary color in Marin's watercolor of 1921, Red and Green and Blue--Autumn, without thinking of Philip Guston or Hans Hofmann; and Marin's Cape Split. Maine, with its fuzzy-edged, vibrating and organic shapes held together by tense flicks of line, equally suggests Gorky or the early De Kooning. Near the end of his life, Marin was almost literally writing the paint onto his canvases --his own title for a 1950 oil was The Written Sea--with an immediacy of gesture that irresistibly reminds one of Pollock. Many of his notes read like a manifesto of the New York School: he was preoccupied with the integrity of the picture plane ("By George I am not to convey the feel that it's bent out of its own individual flatness") and rejected illusionism ("Give paint a chance to show itself entirely as paint").

By judicious editing it would be easy to turn Marin into a founding father of Abstract Expressionism, were it not for the inconvenient detail that he viewed all abstract art with crusty disdain. Reality--the flicker of bronze light on autumnal trees, the long profile of a beach in White Waves on Sand, Maine, the arches and pylons of Brooklyn Bridge, the scud and sough of an Atlantic sou'wester--was obdurate and irreducible for Marin, and had always to be returned to, loved, and above all, declared.

No Debts. His own work reveals an exquisite sense of style, but he never discussed art in stylistic terms; he was apt (and at this distance one cannot know to what degree he used it as a strategic ploy) to act the salty curmudgeon when other artists were discussed. Most French painting he professed to ignore. "I saw a painting of a boat by Manet--to me it was a joke --to me Manet didn't know boats --didn't know the sea." Marin did, however, admire Boudin, the 19th century painter of seascapes and beach resorts--"He knew his boats." Indeed, there is more than a passing resemblance of spirit between Boudin's windswept promenades and sails leaning on empty horizons, and the magnificent succession of Maine seascapes for which Marin is best known. But that is all. Though Marin spent four years in Europe between 1905 and 1909, he never willingly admitted a debt to what he saw there. "Played some billiards, incidentally knocked out some batches of etchings"--such was his summary of his time overseas. His one crucial meeting in Europe was with another American, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who invited him to join the "291" group and acted as his dealer, supporter and closest friend until Stieglitz died.

It was not until his return to New York and his marriage to Marie Jane Hughes that Marin took possession of his freedom as a painter. The Manhattan watercolors of 1911-13, with their thrust, chop and bustle of tower, facade and street, are a peculiarly American reaction to that delight in the tempos of urban life that, at the same moment, had seized the Cubists in Paris and the Futurists in Italy. It was a web of movement, great and small, that he would pursue for the rest of his career, and he described it with his usual laconic concreteness. "In life all things come under the magnetic influence of other things--the bigger assert themselves strongly--the smaller not so much but they still assert themselves and though hidden they strive to be seen and in so doing change their bent and direction. While these powers are at work pushing, pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife and there is a great music being played."

Painted Music. It was in this observation that Marin's modernity lay. He saw nature not as a collection of objects in a neutral space, but as a field of interacting energies, a seamless pattern of events.

A wave rises in the Maine sea and its sharp volume displaces air; Marin painted the wind as visibly as he drew the belly of a sail or the prow of a boat. Such abstraction as went on in his paintings was solely designed to clarify these clashings and peakings of force and substance, to turn it all into paint--"paint wave a'breaking on paint shore." He had instinctively hit upon the same vision of nature that produced the interlocking solidity of Cubist space, but he applied it to landscape in a fluid and dynamic way that bore very little relation or debt to the School of Paris.

Marin loved music, especially English polyphonic composers like Purcell and Orlando Gibbons. He seems to have been the first major American painter to take the nature of music--a sequence of sound events in time--and convert it into a fugue in space. Of the images and marks in his paintings, he noted that "I always try to make them move back and forth from the center of the canvas--like notes leaving and going back to middle C on the keyboard." Music was freedom, like painting. And Marin, an Eastern individualist to the tips of his fingers, valued liberty above all else. It is the final subject matter of those Maine seascapes, with their epic space, cleansing wind and brave sails. In his cottage at Addison, Me., he once wrote: "Isn't it funny that Dictators never never never live by the sea?"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.