EXPLOSIONS OF SEA & SUN

The high priest of art don't give a damn who did it.

THIS typically modest saying of John Marin's contrasts sharply with the spirit surrounding the huge retrospective show held in his honor at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts last week. "You are opening this book," the exhibition catalogue grandly announces, "because John Marin was a great artist." Few self-appointed priests of art would disagree with the judgment, particularly in view of the fact that the word great has become considerably devalued by excessive use. Mann, who died less than two years ago, at 82, is generally ranked with Winslow Homer as a painter of the nation's land and seascapes.

A wry, shy wren of a man, long-haired and sharp-beaked, Mann was as pithy and angular in speech and gesture as in his paintings. He never cottoned to the art of his contemporaries, went his own way slowly. At about 40 he hit his peak, and never came down from it. The last half of Marin's life was mounting triumph. He divided it between New Jersey winters and Maine coast summers (except for two excursions to New Mexico), devoted it to painting pictures that were not so much windows on nature as calculated explosions of sea, sun and open air. He worked fast, using as few strokes as possible, and liked to call his work "writing." It was in fact a sort of shorthand in which a few smudges might stand for breakers, a circle for the sun, and some jagged lines for a stiff nor'easter.

One of the few disappointments of Marin's life was the fact that his oils never caught on as well as his watercolors did. As if to atone for that, Boston's show includes no fewer than 40 oils. They are a bit stiff compared with the watercolors, but examples like the Seascape Fantasy (right) have a richness that only oils can give.

Spring #1 aptly illustrates one of Marin's most complete statements of his approach to art: "Seems to me the true artist must perforce go from time to time to the elemental big forms--Sky, Sea, Mountain, Plain,--and those things pertaining thereto, to sort of re-true himself up, to recharge the battery. For these big forms have everything. But to express these, you have to love these, to be a part of these in sympathy. One doesn't get very far without this love, this love to enfold too the relatively little things that grow on the mountain's back. Which, if you don't recognize, you don't recognize the mountain."

By continually "re-trueing" himself to nature, Marin avoided the last pitfall of great artists: pride. He loved life and enjoyed art to the last. His best biographer, MacKinley Helm, was with him a few days before his death, and tried to comfort him in his pain: " 'But think what it has meant, Mr. Marin,' I said, 'think what it mounts up to to have been painting past eighty and getting better and better."

"[Marin] shook his head slowly. 'Nurse,' he said after a moment, 'please bring us some whiskey.' "

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