Leading presence

John Marin reinvented watercolors and changed the way we view art

John Marin’s watercolors, such as 1921’s On Mount Desert, Maine, have had a profound influence on American art. “Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work” opens Friday at the Arkansas Arts Center.
John Marin’s watercolors, such as 1921’s On Mount Desert, Maine, have had a profound influence on American art. “Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work” opens Friday at the Arkansas Arts Center.

The Arkansas Arts Center's first exhibition of the new year is poised to elevate the museum's profile on the American art landscape.

"Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work," which opens Friday (Arts Center members will get a preview Thursday), focuses on one of the most important artists of American modernism. It was organized by the Arts Center from its John Marin Collection and supplemented by loans from several of the country's top arts institutions, including The National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Art exhibition

‘Becoming John Marin:

Modernist at Work’

Friday-April 22, Arkansas Arts Center, Ninth and Commerce streets, MacArthur Park, Little Rock

Hours: 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday; 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday

Admission: free

Info: arkansasartscenter.…, (501) 372-4000

Sponsors: The Henry Luce Foundation, Luce Fund in American Art; Arkansas Arts Center Foundation; Windgate Charitable Foundation; In Memory of John R. Fletcher by Judy W. Fletcher; Laura Sandage Harden and Lon Clark; JCT Trust; Philip R. Jonsson Foundation; Holleman & Associates, P.A.; Barbara House; Mid-Southern Watercolorists

"This is our opportunity to work with some of the top collections in the country," says Ann Prentice Wagner, exhibition curator and the museum's curator of drawings. "It's an opportunity for them to get to know us better and to get people to realize we are working on that level."

The Arts Center, known for its drawings collection, holds the second largest trove of Marin's art in the world. The National Gallery of Art in Washington has the largest.

Marin, who died in 1953, was an important member of a group of modern artists that included Georgia O'Keeffe, Marsden Hartley and Arthur Dove. They were known as the Stieglitz circle, after New York gallery owner and influential photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who played a pioneering role in the development of a distinctively American approach to modernism.

Marin's bold, expressionist style reinvented watercolor and changed painting itself; his skillful use of abstraction and an almost improvisational approach to color, perspective and movement made him a leading presence in American art. He responded to his subject material, whether rural landscapes or cityscapes, in a visceral way.

He was cited as the greatest painter in America in a 1948 survey of art professionals conducted by Look magazine.

"As the abstract expressionists came forward in the 1940s and 1950s, near the end of Marin's career, people realized that the way he captured energy in his work had connections with people like Jackson Pollock," Wagner says.

The prolific Marin was very successful, though he didn't become a serious artist until he was nearly 40. The Cliffside, N.J., resident was best known for his luminous watercolors of the Maine landscape, where he had a summer home, and his drawings and watercolors of New York.

How did the Arkansas Arts Center come to be the repository of so much of his work?

Norma B. Marin, the artist's daughter-in-law, had friends in Little Rock. Some 290 pieces of her father-in-law's art had been on loan to the Arts Center since 2007.

Wagner says the National Gallery was also instrumental in the Arts Center's acquisitions.

"The National Gallery has long been an encourager and friend of the Arts Center," she says. Andrew Robison, the curator emeritus of prints and drawings at the National Gallery, was friends with Townsend Wolfe, the late executive director of the Arts Center.

Negotiations between the Marin estate and the Arts Center were underway when Wagner arrived in 2012. The next year, Norma Marin, administrator of the artist's estate and the widow of his son, signed the agreement donating the 290 works of John Marin's art to the museum.

"The Arts Center has a long history of collecting and exhibiting great American works on paper, so I feel like we've found the perfect home for them," Norma Marin said in 2013.

What should fascinate art lovers is the scope and depth of the Marin collection. The works span his more than five-decade career and include finished watercolors, drawings and etchings.

. . .

As the exhibition's title suggests, it seeks to reveal much about the artist and his creative process.

"Our collection includes a number of finished watercolors," Wagner says. "One was shown at 291, the first of Stieglitz' galleries. The collection has a lot of sketches and preparatory works, as well as etchings and watercolors."

Wagner says the show has 79 pieces from the museum's Marin Collection plus 33 loans from around the country.

"The first things you'll see are the early landscapes and animals," she says. "We have what may be the best collection of Marin drawings at the Central Park Zoo [1903-05]. The lions and bears are amazing; people will fall in love with them. We borrowed a circus painting from the Met for the exhibition.

"There are a lot are small things, wonderful little pencil drawings. Almost all of these remained in Marin's collection. Stieglitz had a few; O'Keeffe and Marin swapped pieces back and forth when she was placing Stieglitz' estate with various museums. We have a few of those early watercolors that were traded back to Marin. Many were never exhibited. We will show the drawings in groups juxtaposed with finished works; it's really lovely to be able to do this."

Wagner says people will learn "a lot" about how an artist thinks.

"Drawing is an experience we all share," she says. "Everyone draws, at least in childhood. People will be able to see how Marin worked, how he experienced the world."

A specialist in modernism who worked at the Smithsonian American Art Museum before coming to Arkansas, Wagner completed her doctorate in art history at the University of Maryland. Her thesis was on O'Keeffe; she studied Marin drawings in conjunction with her research. Wagner has been working on the Marin Collection "off and on" since she arrived. She also organized "Herman Maril: The Strong Forms of Our Experience," which was exhibited at the Arts Center in 2017 and at the University of Maryland Art Gallery.

Wagner is hopeful the Marin exhibition will go to one or two more museums.

"But only in Little Rock will the 33 loans be seen with these works. I hope people who love great art will come to see this exhibition; it will have a completeness it won't [have] anywhere else."

The 400 page exhibition catalog, "Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work" (hardcover, $50) will be available by early March from the University of Arkansas Press. It will document all 290 pieces in the John Marin Collection. Essay authors include Wagner, Nannette V. Maciejunes, executive director, and David Stark, chief curator, of the Columbus Museum of Art, which loaned work to the exhibition; and Shelley R. Langdale, associate curator of prints and drawings at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Wagner and Josephine White Rodgers, who wrote an essay on Marin's New York City drawings, are co-authors of the catalog.

. . .

Wagner traveled to Maine in fall 2017 to "follow his footsteps over the years." She says she took many photographs and plans to use some of them on an interactive website being set up for the exhibition, becomingjohnmarin.com.

She learned new things about Marin.

"I was surprised to realize how much of a kind of backwoodsman he was," Wagner says. "It became very clear that as he got older, his summering places went steadily northward. He was trying to get away from tourists. He wanted to be in the wilds to the extent he could.

"It also became very clear that many of his favorite buildings were in same area of New York ... City Hall Park is close to St. Paul's Chapel, which shows up in a lot of Marin's work. The Brooklyn Bridge is close by, so is the Woolworth Building. Almost everything he liked to draw in New York was close enough to walk by. It helps give you the experience of his getting to know New York."

For Marin, drawing was all about motion, Wagner says. "He said things like, 'Drawing is the path of motion' over and over. The physical motion, the energy he feels from structures, the way it exerts force and pressure around it; it is visual motion and energy between the structures, how he feels, the motion of his hands as he's drawing.

"A lot was about his experience of place, the excitement of the urban area, with people walking all over the place and how one is never alone, and how different that was from his experience of Maine."

In a letter to Stieglitz he mentioned it was so good to be in Maine where he wasn't constantly being bothered.

"It made a difference in his production," Wagner says. "He didn't do many [preparatory] drawings in Maine and other rural places. He would draw on paper, then do the watercolor right over it. He couldn't set up an easel in City Hall Park and do a lot of watercolors there. He had to do that in the studio.

"He did a lot of drawings on 8-by-10-inch pads of unlined paper. He could walk around and draw in the city and he did watercolors from those drawings. The New York watercolors are a little more indirect than the rural works because of that."

Wagner says there could be more exhibitions. Marin's circus works have not received the attention they deserve, and she'd like to mount an exhibit focused on historical buildings.

"He was an architect; we have a drawing of Independence Hall in the current exhibition."

The National Gallery did a major show in 1990, the Art Institute of Chicago examined his work in 2011.

"He needs to be looked at periodically and re-evaluated as we learn more about art and America, the more things we see in Marin," Wagner says.

"We are showing work scholars and art lovers haven't seen in juxtaposition with great works by Marin."

When you also consider Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art's substantial holdings in modernist art -- particularly its co-ownership, with Fisk University, of the Alfred Stieglitz Collection since August 2012 -- the state is emerging as a must-visit for scholars and lovers of modern American art.

Philadelphia curator Ruth Fine, in a 2014 interview with the Democrat-Gazette, said, "It seems inevitable that people will increasingly come to Arkansas to see and study American [modern] art." Fine is the former curator of modern prints and special projects in modern art at the National Gallery of Art.

The Marin exhibition should underscore that inevitability

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Ann Prentice Wagner examines recently reframed works by John Marin. She is the curator of the Arkansas Arts Center’s new exhibition, “Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work.”

photo

Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection/GIFT OF NORMA B. MARIN

Palisades, Hudson River, New Jersey is a 1923 watercolor and charcoal on paper. The John Marin work is part of the exhibition “Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work.”

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Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection/GIFT OF NORMA B. MARIN

John Marin’s 1944 graphite and watercolor on paper with linen surface is titled Trapeze Artists.

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Courtesy of the John Marin Estate

John Marin was photographed by Alfred Stieglitz in this undated image.

photo

Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection/GIFT OF NORMA B. MARIN

John Marin, a leading American modernist painter, did sketches of animals at the Central Park Zoo between 1903 and 1905. Walking Bear is one of a number of animal drawings in “Becoming John Marin: Modernist at Work” at the Arkansas Arts Center.

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Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection/GIFT OF NORMA B. MARIN

Before he became a successful artist, John Marin was an architect. As an artist, he also documented architecture. Woolworth Building Under Construction is a 1912 graphite on paper.

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Arkansas Arts Center Foundation Collection/GIFT OF NORMA B. MARIN

John Marin’s Blue Shark is a watercolor and charcoal on textured watercolor paper.

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