Marine
JOHN MARIN (1870–1953)
Cape Split, 1940
Oil on canvas, 22 x 28 in.
Signed, dated, and inscribed (at lower right): Marin 40; (on the back): Cape Split / Maine [faint] / Property of No. 1 Cousins / Lyda or Retta Currey / John Marin
RECORDED: Sheldon Reich, John Marin: A Stylistic Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, vol. II (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1970), p. 705 no. 40.7, illus. // William C. Agee, John Marin: The Late Oils, exhib. cat. (New York: Adelson Galleries, 2008), plate 3 illus. in color, pp. 10, 33 // Debra Bricker Balken, John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury, exhib. cat. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), plate 9 illus. in color // “Maine Attractions,” The Boston Globe, July 15, 2011, page G3, illus. in color
EXHIBITED: Adelson Galleries, New York, November 7–December 19, 2008, John Marin: The Late Oils // Portland Museum of Art, Maine, June 23–October 9, 2011; Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, Texas, November 4, 2011–January 8, 2012; Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, Massachusetts, January 27–April 1, 2012, John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury
EX COLL.: the artist, 1940–52; by descent to his son and daughter-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. John Marin, Jr.; private collection, Massachusetts; private collection, Connecticut; [Alexandre Gallery, New York]; [Babcock Gallery, New York]; to private collection, until the present
Maine sparked Marin’s creative energy like no other locale. As noted by one of his early biographers:
The Maine coast was the happiest discovery Marin ever made. It struck him like a revelation.... He found here what he was unable to find in the Berkshires, the Adirondacks, on Manhattan Island,––a complete world: islands, trees, grass, mountains, flowers, sand, rocks, ... and an endless expanse of sea and sky (E. M. Benson, John Marin: The Man and His Work [Washington, D.C.: American Federation of Arts, 1935], p. 68).
Marin continued summer visits to Maine’s rocky and turbulent shores for the remainder of his life. For many years his primary output were watercolors, but Marin soon realized that only the thick, viscous impasto of oil paint could truly and best capture his intentions in painting Maine’s rugged and dynamic sea and shore.
In Marin’s Cape Split, vigorous and fluent brushstrokes forcefully convey the impression of waves crashing and spray exploding off shoreline rocks. The pounding Maine ocean appears as a turbulent amalgam of hues and forms and brushstrokes: energetic and uncontained. Marin already had a longstanding relationship with the Maine sea, and as early as 1914 had written in a letter to his dealer Alfred Stieglitz that the Maine shore represented a “fierce, relentless, cruel, beautiful, fascinating, hellish place.” Cape Split then became a mainstay of his painting and life, particularly after he bought a house in nearby Addison in the early 1930s. He spent nearly every summer and early fall there until his death.
Painted during a decade of brilliant achievement and critical acclaim, and certainly one of Marin’s finest paintings, Cape Split demonstrates the exquisite balance between elements of abstraction and realism that earned Marin distinction and continuing recognition as one of the most venerated American artists of the twentieth century.
