UM art museum offers glimpse at inspired art

BANGOR – In commemoration of the 50th year anniversary of the death of John Marin, the University of Maine Museum of Art will present “John Marin’s Maine,” through Jan. 17.

The exhibit, which celebrates Marin’s life, chronicles the 38 years from 1914 to 1953, when the artist painted in Maine. The exhibition will include watercolors, important drawings and works on canvas.

Marin was born in 1870 in Rutherford, N.J. As a young man, he worked in architects’ offices and from 1893 to 1895, he was a free-lance architect. During that time, Marin became increasingly interested in sketching. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia from 1899 to 1901 and at the Art Students League in New York in 1904. When he lived in Paris from 1905 to 1909, Marin made trips to Holland, Belgium, Italy and England.

Although he worked mainly as an etcher in the tradition of Whistler, he also made a number of watercolors and pastels.

Marin returned to New York in 1909 for his first one-man exhibition at Stieglitz’s Photo-Secession Gallery and returned briefly to Europe from 1910 to 1911 before settling permanently in the United States.

Marin lived in Cliffside, N.J. from 1916 until his death in 1953. He spent summers in the Berkshires, the Adirondacks, the Delaware River country and Maine. He loved the coast of Maine most of all and summered in Small Point or Deer Island and at Cape Split from 1933 to 1953.

Marin developed a more dynamic, fractured style after 1912 in his effort to depict the interaction of conflicting forces, gradually evolving ways of rendering his vivid impressions of sea, sky, mountains or the skyscrapers of Manhattan.

Although he worked almost exclusively in watercolors during the 1920s, Marin painted largely in oils after 1930.

Marin believed he had to know a place intimately before he could paint it. A particularly vocal opponent of what he considered the “self-indulgence” of pure abstraction, Marin tried to imbue each painting with his love of the visible world. One critic’s observation that Marin painted from an inner vision offended the artist deeply and he summarily dismissed the notion as rubbish.

Marin could not conceive of an art of consequence that was not grounded in the act of seeing. To Marin, “seeing” was a “repetition of glimpses” and each painting an opportunity to capture in a single, striking image the “eye of many lookings.”