Ragged Island, Maine

Prints and Drawings

1914

John Marin
American, 1870-1953

This aptly named island—a mound of stone, pine, and rocky cliffs in Northeast Casco Bay, just a few miles west of Small Point, Maine—prompted Marin to move away from the literal representation of space. Without differentiating cliff from shoreline, the tipped-up composition provides no perspective, generating a sense of vertigo held in check by a peaceful blue sea. The sea was created by adding excess blue, then tilting the paper, encouraging the wash to pool and dry along the rocks. Marin emphasized the flat patterning of the composition by selecting a wide, flat frame for this work.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Prints and Drawings

Artist: John Marin
Title: Ragged Island, Maine
Place: United States (Artist's nationality)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: 1914
Medium: Watercolor with rewetting and blotting, over graphite, on moderately thick, slightly textured, off-white wove paper (top and left edges trimmed), in original frame
Dimensions: 42 × 49.7 cm (16 9/16 × 19 5/8 in.)
Credit Line: Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Reference Number: 1949.555
Copyright: © 2018 Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

American Art Research Council no. 179-X.
Sheldon Reich, John Marin, Part II: Catalogue Raisonné (Tucson, Ariz., 1970), p. 397, no. 14.60 (ill), as “Ragged Island, Maine.”
Karen Wilkin, “Art: John Marin in Chicago” (review), The New Criterion 29, no. 7 (March 2011), p. 48 (not repro).
Tyler Green, “Best books: AIC’s “John Marin’s Watercolors,” Modern Art Notes (blog), accessed April 26, 2011, http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/2011/04/best-books-aics-john-marins-watercolors/.

New York, Photo-Secession Galleries, “John Marin,” Feb. 23–Mar. 15, 1915, cat. 16.
Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, “Selections and Transformations: The Art of John Marin,” Jan. 28-Apr. 15, 1990, pp. 168 and 170, pl. 160.
Art Institute of Chicago, “John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism,” Jan. 19-Apr. 17, 2011, pp. 48-49, 63, 133, 135, figs. 33 & 46a, pl. 58; traveled to the High Museum, Atlanta, June 26-Sept. 11, 2011.

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), New York; Stieglitz Estate (Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), executor); given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1949.

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