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JOHN MARIN
(American, 1870-1953)
Looking Outward, 1921
Watercolor with chalk on cream wove paper
14 x 17”
Bequest of George and Susan Proskauer 1992.17.27

John Marin grew up in Rutherford, New Jersey, just across the Hudson River from Manhattan. He studied formally at the Art Students League in New York and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, and he supplemented his studies with five years of travel abroad, where he was exposed to European modernism. After he returned to America in 1911, Marin’s willingness to distort reality for expressive purposes moved his work increasingly toward abstraction. The artist delighted in capturing the essence of a place, and while his familiar imagery of farm, field, and ocean ties his work to landscape traditions, Marin’s calligraphic lines, simplified forms, and planes of vivid colors signal his modernist sensibility. Marin employed these techniques in many of his watercolors, which often depict scenes of Cape Split, Maine, where he spent many summers. In Looking Outward, which exhibits Marin’s debt to the structures of Cubism and the vivid colors of Fauvism, the turbulent waves and vast horizons of the Maine landscape create a dynamic interplay of the forms and rhythm of nature.