Movement No 23–The Sea and Pertaining Thereto

Prints and Drawings

1927

John Marin
American, 1870-1953

Marin employed colored pencil differently in this sheet than he had in previous works, adding watercolor pigment subtly and tentatively and leaving thin gray lines that he neither reinforced nor repeated. While he used underdrawing to outline solid objects, he drew over the washes in order to indicate intangible pictorial elements such as the direction of the waves; the fine lines add touches of precision to the fluid, wet-into-wet paint effects that predominate.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Prints and Drawings

Artist: John Marin
Title: Movement No 23–The Sea and Pertaining Thereto
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.: 1927
Medium: Watercolor with blotting, wiping, and touches of scraping, and with black and brown colored pencils, on moderately thick (estimated), moderately textured, ivory wove paper (top, right and lower edges trimmed), hinged to paper prepared with a black wash, with a decorative paperboard collar gilt with silver leaf, laid down on wood-pulp board faced with cream wove paper, in original frame
Inscriptions: Signed and dated lower right, in blue watercolor, over black colored pencil: "Marin 27"
Dimensions: Primary support: 35.2 × 45.7 cm (13 7/8 × 18 in.); Secondary support, including decorative collar: 37.5 × 47.5 cm (14 13/16 × 18 3/4 in.); Tertiary support: 44 × 53.7 cm (17 3/8 × 21 3/16 in.)
Credit Line: Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Reference Number: 1949.566
Copyright: © 2018 Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

American Art Research Council (Whitney), no. 35-X
Sheldon Reich, John Marin: A Stylistic Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné II (Tucson, Ariz., 1970), p. 579, no. 27.17 (ill).

New York, Intimate Gallery, “John Marin,” Nov.-Dec., 1928, cat. 23.
Art Institute of Chicago, “John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism,” Jan. 19-Apr. 17, 2011, pp. 55, 70-71, 75, 157-58, fig. 57a, pl. 79; 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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