The Modern Art Notes Podcast: John Marin, oil painter?

The American painter John Marin is typically regarded as one of the two or three greatest American modernists. Since Cezanne, no painter has made watercolors that are as vibrant as Marin's, and you'd be hard-pressed to find any artist who made the medium as central to his experiments as Marin did. Marin didn't just paint watercolors, he collaged them, scuffed them, drew on them and pushed watercolor as far as he could.

Then, when Marin was 63 years old, he seems to have had a minor crisis related to his potential legacy. He wondered if his watercolors would be enough to secure his place in history. In 1933 he bought a house in Cape Split, Maine -- and started painting in oil.

An exhibition on view now at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth explores the work Marin made between 1933 and the end of his life twenty years later, demonstrating how he tackled oil paint even as he continued in watercolor. The show was co-organized for the Portland Museum of Art and by the Addison Gallery of American Art by one of the top scholars of American modernism and this week's podcast guest,Debra Bricker Balken. Before curating"John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury,"Balken organized exhibitions of Arthur Doveand of Dove and Georgia O'Keeffe. [Image: John Marin, Hurricane, 1944. Collection of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. A detail from this painting is in this week's MANPodcast.combanner.]

In our conversation Balken and I discuss:

• Why John Marin bought his house in Cape Split and how it impacted his work;
• Why he started painting in oil;
• How much attention he paid to the rise of abstract expressionism -- and how much the abstract expressionists paid to him;
• Whether Marin painted ambidextrously (!);
• Marin's now-rare painted frames; and
• Whether Marin had a significant impact on Jackson Pollock.

In this week's draft segment, Ed Schad and I look at artists whose work is featured in exhibitions and scholarship launched as part of the Getty-funded Pacific Standard Time initiative and who we think deserve in-depth, sustained attention from curators, critics and collectors. Schad is an assistant curator at The Broad Art Foundation and a critic who publishes in ArtSlant magazine, in LA Weekly and on I Call It ORANGES.