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Marin's formal education included the public schools, later a private academy, and one year at Stevens Institute. During the period from 1888 to 1898 he produced a series of water colors, a medium in which he later distinguished himself. In 1898 he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy. By 1905 he was so far advanced in his career that it was with difficulty he was persuaded to go to Paris for further study.
 
Here Marin encountered the full force of the Etching Revival, exploited by Whistler and pioneered by Meryon. A later visit to Venice resulted in his series of etchings of canals and palaces, in the Whistler style, which brought him his first fame.

Upon Marin's return to New York, his meeting with Alfred Stieglitz and his first contact with the work of Cezanne were climacteric. His association with Albert Maurer, Arthur Dove, and Marsden Hartley, first at Stieglitz' "Intimate Gallery" and alter at his "American Place" in association with Demuth and O'Keeffe, became definitive. From 1913, when he exhibited one work in the famous Armory Show, to 1926, when he removed to Stonington, Maine, his art had become, in the words of the American critic Lewis Mumford, "among the finest fruits of our generation."

Around the year 1940 Marin began his first important use of the medium of oil painting. In this he projected all his ideas regarding subject, color, form, and style which he had carried to such distinguished heights in water color. While to many observers his work appears "abstract", it is never non-objective. The ocean is an ocean, a tree a tree, and a building a building. However, he elects certain aspects of his subject and plays upon them as a musician selects a musical theme, weaving and re-weaving it into a single composition. In this difficult process of synthesis Marin never loses his way. The result is an apparently easy simplification of a complex natural phenomenon, focused through the lens of his mental eye, projected upon paper or canvas by means of a trained hand, disciplined by a discriminating intellectual and emotional instrument . . . . which is the artist himself.

Of his attitude Marin writes: "The sea that I paint, may not be the sea but it is a sea . . . . not an abstraction."

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