Marin’s Maine UM art show highlights Modernist master’s paintings of Down East

When the painter John Marin first came to Maine in 1914, he had a mixed reaction. The New Jersey native arrived in West Point, a fishing village in Phippsburg, and promptly sent a letter to Alfred Stieglitz, his art dealer in New York. “This is one fierce, relentless, cruel, beautiful, fascinating, hellish and all the other ish’es, place,” he wrote.

Despite the “ish’es” Marin came back, year after year, with his wife, Marie, and son, John Marin Jr. First to West Point, then Mount Desert Island, Deer Isle, Stonington, and finally, in 1933, to Cape Split in South Addison, where he spent the rest of his summers.

By 1943, his letters had taken on a far different tone. That year, he couldn’t make the trip north. In a letter to his friend Herbert Seligmann, Marin asked him to mail two bottles: one filled with seawater, the other with salty Cape Split air. If he couldn’t get to Maine, he’d have a bit of Maine sent to him.

The state, with its rocky shores, bustling harbors and mountains that drop off into the sea, had become necessary to the artist – and his work. The University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor will highlight that work, painted from 1914 to 1953, in “John Marin’s Maine,” which opens to the public Thursday, Oct. 2, a day after the 50th anniversary of his death.

“Anybody running a museum would be ecstatic to have a John Marin show,” said UM museum director Wally Mason. “These are works that are revered by all. In terms of American art history, when it’s all written, John Marin is one of the artists at the forefront of 20th century art.”

Marin was born in Rutherford, N.J., in 1870. As a young man, he developed an interest in sketching while working as an architect, which led him to study art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Students League in New York. While living in Paris in the early 1900s, he worked as an etcher, but began to explore watercolors and pastels. Inspired by the cubist work of Cezanne, he developed his own style that depicted the motion of nature in a fractured, geometric way.

In 1948, Look magazine surveyed the nation’s art critics, museum directors and prominent artists to determine the most influential artist of the day. Their pick? Marin. He had become a pioneer of American Modernism, and his work continues to influence contemporary painters.

“I certainly think the artists of today look back to artists like Marin and are astounded at how ahead of his time he was,” Meredith Ward, director of the Richard York Gallery in New York, said by phone. Her gallery lent many of the paintings to the University of Maine show. “Marin would look at the world around him and abstract forms, whether it was a seascape in the rocky coast of Maine or a skyscraper in Manhattan.”

Carl Little, an art critic and author who lives in the town of Mount Desert, recently recalled one of his earliest experiences with Marin’s work. In the late 1970s, Little had joined his uncle, renowned artist William Kienbusch, on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to view the Stieglitz collection of Marin watercolors. The two men were ushered into a room with three boxes of paintings, told how to handle them and left alone.

“Bill was just in heaven,” Little said. “This was his god and to have that opportunity … I was just along for the ride, sharing in his enthusiasm, but not understanding all that was going on.”

As Little and his uncle looked at a painting of Stonington, each had a different take.

“To me, it looked like a shattered landscape,” Little said.

To his uncle, it looked like, well, Stonington. He pointed to one building and said, “That’s where Marin lived.” Then he picked out his own apartment.

“It all just coalesced,” Little said. “It’s not representational in the normal sense of that, the realistic, but it was all there. … They were representational with a very strong abstract-leaning quality to them.”

Marin took the Maine landscape and made it his own. In quick sketches, powerful watercolors and luminous oils, he captured the energy of the choppy sea, a flock of gulls or a boat on the water. He turned a working harbor into a kaleidoscope of angles and lines. He distilled the view from Cape Split into its fundamental elements – an ocean of glistening turquoise and masses of craggy rocks, thick with paint.

“If you think of him as a medium for nature, he was experiencing this as immediately as he possibly could,” Little said. “He’s right in the teeth of it. I think that shows in his work.”

In Maine, Marin didn’t have a formal studio. He often went out on the rocks or in his boat to experience the elements – he lived his paintings. But he didn’t object to borrowing elements, either. The schooner in his 1945 painting “Sea Piece” never sailed past Cape Split. It came from a sketch of a doorknocker in Bangor.

“Sea Piece” will be one of more than 20 works on view in “John Marin’s Maine,” which is among the most significant shows Mason has hosted during his tenure at the University of Maine. It comes at a pivotal time – in the 10 months since the museum moved off the Orono campus to downtown Bangor, Mason has seen membership and exhibits of Maine artists increase. He hopes both trends continue.

“The fact that we can concentrate on John Marin is perfect at this juncture,” Mason said. “I find myself in the position to be an advocate at the museum level for artists who live in the state, in this instance, it’s a case of setting a historical tone. … It also gives us a historical credibility.”

In terms of history, Marin may be better-known for his urban landscapes than his Down East scenes, but Maine always was a part of him, as Ward wrote in the catalog for the UM exhibition:

“The beauty and grandeur of the Maine landscape provided Marin with some of his greatest artistic inspiration, and some of his happiest moments.”

“John Marin’s Maine” is on view from Oct. 2 to Jan. 17 at the University of Maine Museum of Art, 40 Harlow St., Bangor. Museum hours are 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is free for museum members or $3 for nonmembers. For information, call 561-3350.

Kristen Andresen can be reached at kandresen@bangordailynews.net.