John Marin by MacKinley Helm

MacKinley Helm research material on John Marin, 1924-1964

Helm, MacKinley, b. 1896 d. 1963

Collection size: 150 items (on partial microfilm reel).

Collection Summary: Papers relating to Helm's biography of John Marin, JOHN MARIN (1948), including: correspondence, 1946-1964, with John Marin, John Marin, Jr., and others; lists of paintings; photos of Marin and works of art; clippings; exhibition catalogs and announcements, 1924-1955 and miscellany.

Lent for microfilming 1964 by Mrs. MacKinley Helm.

JOHN MARIN by Mackinley Helm, Pelligrini & Cudahy with Boston Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and Toronto, 1948. Binding is Hard Cover. Good Condition. First Edition. A book on the life and work of John Marin including a poem and many other private letters and publishings of the artist included in the text. Introduction to this edition by John Marin himself. Cream colored cloth with navy linen cloth spine, 255 pages but, as usual in this edition, pagination numbers jumps from page 104 to page 123 for no apparent reason (at the division between text ending and collection of plates), but no pages are missing. lncludes nine full color page plates followed by about 120 pages of black and white plates.

Rare materials for the art collector and scholar.

John Marin. Boston: Pellegrini & Cudahy (reissued: New York: Kennedy; Da Capo Press, 1970)    

        First Edition. A book on the life and work of John Marin including a poem and many other private letters and publishings of the artist included in the text. Introduction to this edition by John Marin himself. Cream colored cloth with navy linen cloth spine, 255 pages but, as usual in this edition, pagination numbers jumps from page 104 to page 123 for no apparent reason (at the division between text ending and collection of plates), but no pages are missing. lncludes nine full color page plates followed by about 120 pages of black and white plates.

n 1914, Marin began escaping the bustle of New York City to spend months at a time painting the rugged Maine coast. The rocky promontories and wild, churning sea had a profound impact on his artistic direction. “After Marin discovered Maine and its seascapes in 1914, it became his most compelling subject matter.” (S. Hunter, Expression and Meaning: The Marine Paintings

of John Marin, exhibition catalogue, West Palm Beach, Florida, 1999, p. 14) Fascinated by the rugged natural environs of Maine, Marin returned to the area frequently until his death in 1953. He continually strove to fully capture the wonders of the area in his paintings: “In nature/You see things objects back of one another/in painting they are all on one plane/therefore the great transposition/but there is no way out/You make things in paint as they are made in nature/things are built in nature things are built in paint.

Having worked primarily in oil from 1910 to 1914, Marin had abandoned the medium for the freer watercolor. However, in the 1930s, he began to revisit oil painting. As seen in Goose Rock, Small Point, Maine, his rediscovery of the oil medium provided a new means of expression for the artist. “When
he used oil pigment, he could also handle it thickly and deliberately, or with an extraordinary swiftness and lightness, reconstituting those summary, spontaneous indications of movement that seemed even more appropriate to his poetic watercolor études of landscape and the sea.