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JOHN MARIN (American, 1870-1953) Sunset, Cape Split, Maine, 1943 Watercolor and graphite on paper laid on paper 5-3/4 x 16 inches (14.6 x 40.6 cm) Signed and dated lower right: Marin 43 Titled and dated verso: Sunset / Cape Split / Me / 1943 PROVENANCE: The Downtown Gallery, New York; Mr. and Mrs. Irving Brown, Brooklyn, 1961; Private collection, New York. EXHIBITED: Birnham Wood Galleries, New York, "Modern Life: American Paintings Between the Wars," July 5 - August 5, 2007. LITERATURE: S. Reich, John Marin: A Stylistic Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné, Tucson, Arizona, 1970, p. 729, no. 43.16. From 1907 through 1917, Alfred Stiegliz's New York gallery "291" and its successor "An American Place" became the epicenter of a new community of artists and critics who championed modern art, photography as a fine art, and also children's art and naïve art in the United States. Stieglitz promoted the work of a core group of American modernists who experimented with varying degrees of abstraction in their work, and who were eventually dubbed "the Stieglitz Group." These figures included John Marin, Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley, all of whom explored the merits of form and color in a way that would come to define the direction of early American modernism. Marin was a master of his preferred watercolor medium, and Sunset, Cape Split, Maine displays his confidence and virtuosity with it. With just a few strokes of color, Marin captures the spirit of an electric sunset on water laid out before him with brilliant vitality. The blues, reds, pinks, and purples fill the sky and are echoed in the water. Maine was a favorite subject of Marin's; he vacationed there every summer from 1914 until his death in 1953, and drew much of his artistic inspiration from its soaring skies and cranky shorelines.