John Marin

An early modernist artist associated with the Stieglitz circle, John Marin is best known for his watercolors of coastal Maine and urban scenes of New York. Patron Mabel Dodge Luhan invited him to spend summers at her artist’s compound in Taos, New Mexico, where he captured the mountains, open sky, and vast distances visible in the arid climate.

In November 1940, Marin, Charles Burchfield, and Eliot O’Hara served on a jury for a watercolor competition at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC for the Carville, Louisiana Marine Hospital. Burchfield wrote that it was:

A grueling job – 10000 pictures – from which we selected 900 – 300 for hospital, and 600 for exhibition & sale.

One of the interesting things about serving on a jury — one of the compensations — is meeting artists whose work you have known a long time — (They never are “like”)

I had expected Marin to be tall, bony & vigorous and perhaps something of a poseur – I was wrong on every count except his head, which was very like [Gaston Lachaise’s] bronze of him – But otherwise, I would scarcely have recognized him as Marin of the water-colors I knew – Thin, slightly built, with something of a stoop, and very shy. Dominating his whole physical being were his black piercing eyes, that seemed to peer out at one from a “cave” of deep eye-sockets, with his unkempt strangling hair above – Before the session was over, I had grown to like him very much, — more – there was a quality about him that could only be described as lovable – I was drawn to him very strongly (and Mrs. Phillips told me he too, liked me) —

In 1958, the artist’s son, John Marin, Jr., purchased Burchfield’s masterpiece, Song of the Telegraph (1917-52).