Marin’s interpretation of this landscape incorporates rectangles, circles, and triangles that take the image to the point of essential abstraction. The structure of the composition is severely flattened, the foreground marked by shrubs and the background by mountain peaks; sandwiched in between, are earth-colored geo-metric planes marked with dots and lines referencing fields and plant life. Drawing on the decorative vocabulary that he discovered in indigenous Southwestern pottery, blankets, and jewelry, Marin incorporated pyramids, triangles, and zigzag patterns to establish borders that hold his dynamic composition in check.
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.
Sheldon Reich, John Marin, Part II: Catalogue Raisonné (Tucson, Ariz., 1970), p. 620, no. 30.20 (ill).
Uduall, Sharon Rohlfen , Modernist Painting in New Mexico, 1913-1935, (Albuquerque, N.M., 1984), p. 132, fig. 56.
Judith A. Barter, Sarah E. Kelly, Denise Mahoney, Ellen E. Roberts, and Brandon K. Ruud, American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 110-12, cat. 41 (color ill.).
Judith A. Barter et al., “American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955,” (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2009), cat.
Possibly, New York, An American Place, “John Marin,” Oct. 11-Nov. 27, 1931, one of 30 New Mexico watercolors shown.
New York, Museum of Modern Art, “John Marin,” 1936, cat. 128.
Washington D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, “John Marin: In Retrospect,” Mar. 2-Apr. 15, 1962, cat. 69; also the Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, May 9-June 24, 1962.
Albuquerque, N. Mex., University Art Museum, The University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, “Marin in New Mexico,” Nov. 18–Dec. 29, 1968, p. 32, cat. 42; also San Antonio, Tex., Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, Feb. 7–Mar. 7, 1969; and Fort Worth, Tex., Amon Carter Museum, Mar. 21–May 12, 1969.
Evanston, IL., Terra Museum of American Art, “Five American Masters of Watercolor,” May 5-July 12, 1981.
Art Institute of Chicago, “Window on the West: Chicago and the Art of the New Frontier (1890–1940),” June 28-Sept. 27, 2003, cat. 59, p. 138, fig. 45.
Art Institute of Chicago, “John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism,” Jan. 19-Apr. 17, 2011, pp. 12 (detail)-19, 72-73, fig. 61a, pl. 2; 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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