In 1933, John Marin spent his first summer on Cape Split in Addison, Maine. He experienced an immediate affinity for this remote, sparsely populated, and rugged area so far removed from tourist traffic. The following year, the Marins bought a house in South Addison that was built on a rocky promontory overlooking Pleasant Bay. Marin spent a considerable amount of time on his open front porch painting the sea, which was only about 25 feet away. In 1936, he informed Stieglitz: “Here the Sea is so damned insistent that houses and land things won’t appear much in my pictures.” That same year he told an art critic: “I find my brush moving in the rhythm of wave or sail or rock.” Ruth Fine has described how the sea became one of the artist’s major motifs: “Moment by moment, day by day, season by season, year by year, he continued to chart the changes that took place in the bay outside his house and throughout the surrounding area. Portraying the sea in all its moods—calm or violent, gray or filled with color, luminous or leaden—he created an extraordinary record of what must be one of the most beautiful places in the world.”
Grey Sea, one of Marin’s most evocative marine images, is not rendered in watercolor, the predominant medium of his career, but rather oil, a medium he began to explore more extensively beginning in the late 1920s. His exuberant, expressionistic brushwork has allowed him to achieve an astonishing variety of textures, ranging from thick twists of heavily applied paint seemingly squeezed directly from the tube, to short, straight brushstrokes, to smoothly flowing passages, and even, by way of contrast, to a reserved area of raw, untouched canvas at the bottom center of the picture offset by the swirling pigments around it—effects that could not have been achieved with watercolor. The vigorous technique conveys a vivid sense of a primal, elemental clash between sea, sky, and land. More specifically, Grey Sea is thought to have been painted in the aftermath of a serious hurricane that ravaged lower New England and Long Island for nearly two weeks in September 1938. This may explain the patch of bare canvas with its graphic spiral, which perhaps functions as the “eye of the storm” in Marin’s painting.
Marin represented the ocean’s waves as stylized, triangular configurations that assume their shape as they emerge from the sea, only to be broken into formless, churning whitewater after striking the rocks on the shore. In Grey Sea, small triangles are scattered along the bottom foreground, and a single large one appears in the center of the composition, leaning toward the shore. Imparting a rhythmic sense to the composition’s surface, Marin derived these abstract forms from his observations of natural phenomena and his visceral connection to the dynamic, underlying forces of nature.
Marin had begun using geometric forms as part of his visual vocabulary in 1931, a tendency that would later reach one of its most extreme manifestations in The Fog Lifts [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] John Marin, The Fog Lifts, 1949, oil on canvas, Roland P. Murdock Collection, Wichita Art Museum. These geometric motifs also play an especially prominent role in related oils from the late 1930s: Wave on Rock [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] John Marin, Wave on Rock, 1937, oil on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from Charles Simon and the Painting and Sculpture Committee 81.18, Off Cape Split, Maine (1938, private collection, R. 38.25), and the watercolor Breaking Sea, Cape Split, Maine (1939, Sid Deutsch Gallery, New York, R. 39.7).
As early as 1917, Marin was enthusiastically describing the distinctive coastline of Maine to Alfred Stieglitz (American, 1864 - 1946): “Big shelving, wonderful rocks, hoary with enormous hanging beards of seaweed, carrying forests of evergreen on their backs. The big tides come in, swift, go out swift. And the winds bring in big waves, they pound the beaches and rocks.” Marin’s enthusiasm would continue over the course of his long career, and in time his innovative paintings would take their place among those of the many other important American painters who depicted the state’s uniquely American landscape, including the epochal seascapes of his illustrious predecessor, Winslow Homer (American, 1836 - 1910), as well as the iconic images of Mount Katahdin by his great contemporary in the Stieglitz group, Marsden Hartley (American, 1877 - 1943). Marin’s Maine seascapes have also more recently come to be understood, as they had been at the time of Marin’s death, in the context of the works of the abstract expressionists. His emphasis on painterly, expressive gestures, and the churning, mercurial process of painting itself link him to the concerns of Willem de Kooning (American, born the Netherlands, 1904 - 1997), Jackson Pollock (American, 1912 - 1956), and other midcentury artists. In works like Grey Sea, Marin, like Pollock in Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), collapses the distinction between the painter and subject. The vital identification in Marin’s work between the artist and the sea demonstrates the credo espoused by Pollock, who, when asked by the influential painter and teacher Hans Hofmann (American, born Germany, 1880 - 1966) whether he painted from nature, famously responded: “I am nature.”
Robert Torchia
September 29, 2016
