Monday Morning Museum: John Marin

John Marin, circa 1921-1922 by Alfred Stieglitz

John Marin – Friday 23 December 1870 Rutherford, New Jersey to Friday 2 October 1953 Addison, Maine

American Modernist Painter

Brooklyn Bridge, circa 1912

"Brooklyn Bridge," dating about 1912, is of the period of Marin's first truly personal expression. Brightly, wittily, it communicates his sense of the excitement of urban life. In conjunction with one of his Photo-Secession shows, he wrote in "Camera Work" about his New York watercolors: "Shall we consider the life of a great city as confined simply to the people and animals on its streets and in its buildings? Are the buildings themselves dead? . . . I see great forces at work: great movements; the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and the small; influences of one mass on another greater or smaller mass. Feelings are aroused which give me the desire to express the reaction of these 'pull forces,' those influences which play with one another; great masses pulling smaller masses, each subject in some degree to the other's power. . . . While these powers are at work pushing, pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife and there is great music being played. And so I try to express graphically what a great city is doing. Within the frames there must be a balance, a controlling of these warring, pushing, pulling forces." – Metropolitan Museum of Art

Last Monday’s Artist – Rembrandt Peale
Next Monday’s Artist – Roger Fenton

“Monday Morning Museum” logo created by Adrean Darce Brent