Exhibited
(Possibly) University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, January 7-June 23, 1948 (tour of galleries).
"John Marin," University of Miami Art Gallery, Miami, Florida, October 2-23, 1951, no. 7.

Literature
Sheldon Reich, John Marin: A Stylistic Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, Part II, Tucson, Arizona, 1970, p. 450, no. 17.31 (illustrated).

Note
In the summer of 1914, 44 year-old John Marin discovered the coast of Maine for the very first time. For the rest of his career, the artist would routinely return to the locale, spending his summers in Small Point with his family. With its tempestuous ocean, rugged seashore and dramatic coastlines, Maine provided Marin with a one-of-a-kind subject matter that never ceased to inspire him throughout his lifetime. Like artists Martin Johnson Heade or Thomas Cole before him, but also similarly to literary figures like Walt Whitman, Marin found in Maine the boundless energy of life and nature that he wanted to apply to his art.
The present work, along with Lot 53 speak to that lust for energy and vigor. With rough charcoal outlines and explosive washes of watercolor, Marin transforms each landscape, a simple view of pine trees and a quiet cove, respectively, into an abstract, dancing vision of light and color altogether. Sand Dunes recalls other works the artist did in 1917 – some of the most abstract watercolors Marin ever executed – influenced by an exhibition of Georgia O’Keefe’s watercolors of simplified natural forms.
Marin’s peculiar technique goes even further in Rocks, Bit of Sea, Cape Split, (Lot 53) where he conveys the dynamism of the water washing across the rocks. In his description of the work, S. Reich explained: “Here, [Marin] reduced his descriptive passages to the formulaic series of dots, dashes, curls and circles that came to represent his perception of the shore, sea and ship.” He adds: “he continued to reduce the number and scope of his symbolic elements-slashing, connecting diagonal blue grey lines for rocky shore, deep blue dots on lighter fields for the sea and radiating vertical washes of pale blue strokes for sky and sun.”
In the two works, Marin finds a fine balance between abstraction and realism, helped in that regard by the nature of the watercolor medium itself, which allows him to splatter an impressive array of explosive colors and obtain varying shades of a same hue on a striking white sheet, which the artist often leaves bare.

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Lot 52

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