Whenever I hear the name John Marin, an odd fact comes back to me: in 1948, Look magazine named him America’s No. 1 artist, based on a poll of curators and artists.
It’s a puzzlement: I appreciate and, in fact, like his work, but he never struck me as the best of American modernists, let alone the broader universe of artists. Nowadays, his work often gets a shrug. From his day, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Stuart Davis — to name just three — outshine him. The last big exhibition of his work may have been in 1990, when the National Gallery of Art mounted Selections and Transformations: The Art of John Marin.
But now comes a documentary: John Marin: “Let the Paint be Paint!” Made by independent filmmakers Michael Maglaras and Terri Templeton, it debuts on Dec. 11 at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, followed by a national tour next year.
Maglaras also made Cleophas and His Own, a film of the poem Marsden Hartley wrote about his experiences in Nova Scotia with a family named Mason. That’s when he and his wife, Templeton, formed 217 Films, which he self-finances. The films are, his PR rep says, labors of love. The duo went on to film Visible Silence: Marsden Hartley, Painter and Poet, and now the work about Marin, which was shot at his summer home on Cape Split in Addison, Maine. The Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram has more about the story of the film here.
The filmmakers are writing a blog about their work here. And they’ve posted clips on YouTube, the first one being here.
Filmmakers about visual artists have a tough task: if it’s about the artist’s life, instead of his/her art, it often doesn’t do the job of helping people to appreciate the work. On the other hand, if it’s a film of visual closeups of paintings, plus narration and still photographs, it tends to be of interest only to people already interested in the subject.
Judging from the YouTube clips, “Let the Paint be Paint!” follows the latter formula. But I’m hoping it helps me, and others, understand why Marin was No. 1 in 1948.
Photo: Courtesy the Estate of John Marin