John Curray Marin was born in Rutherford, New Jersey, in 1870. His mother died shortly after, and his father, a traveling salesman, was seldom home. Young John was raised in Weehawken by his grandparents, and later on by his two aunts. He started drawing at the age of seven, and his aunts allowed him many unsupervised hours during extensive summertime excursions to roam the countryside and into the woods to hunt, fish, and sketch from nature. Marin recalled: 'I just drew. I drew every chance I got.'

It has always been clear that Marin was an artist at heart, but nonetheless, his career took several forms. He shifted between working for a wholesale notions house, training, and working as an architect back in New Jersey, attending the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Art Students League in New York thereafter. As an architect, he developed a fondness for architectural subjects. He filled sketchbooks with drawings and watercolors of homes, barns, and other buildings. These watercolors were softly atmospheric and influenced by the American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Marin's mature modernist vision was rooted in these early drawings and watercolors.

In 1905, he moved to Paris, where he made picturesque etchings of European architecture for the tourist trade. He soon started chafing at the restrictions of such commercial work and began to experiment with watercolor. In 1908 a series of these watercolors were shown at the Salon d'Automne. One of the visitors of the exhibition is the American photographer and painter Edward Steichen, who acted as a talent scout for Alfred Stieglitz's groundbreaking exhibitions of modern art at 291, his gallery in New York City. Steichen instantly recognized Marin's original artistic genius, which he enthusiastically communicated to Stieglitz. Once Stiegltiz saw Marin's watercolors and etchings, he invited him to exhibit together with other American modernists like Arthur Dove and Marsden Hartley in 291.

When Marin returned from Europe to New York in 1909 a drastic transformation took place in his home city: cars and trucks replaced horses and the first sky-scrapings rose in quick succession in lower Manhattan. The spectacle of these modern constructions fascinated him. He made drawings and watercolors of the buildings under construction and after they are completed. These drawings were quick, vigorous notations recording the forces and motions he felt in the buildings and the figures in the streets. He caught fleeting glimpses of rushed pedestrians. He wrote: “The drawings were mostly made in a series of wanderings around my city, New York, with pencil on paper and sort of shorthand writings as it were, swiftly put down obeying impulses of a willful intoxicating mustness, of the nearness of the being in it, being part of it, of that which to my eye went on, of the rhythmic movements of people on streets, of buildings rearing up from the pavement, sort of mad wonder, dancing to away there up aloft.”

Around 1913, Marin made drawings of the Woolworth Building, the tallest building on the Manhattan skyline before the Empire State Building took its place. The watercolors appeared at the 291 gallery and moved then to the renowned 1913 International Exhibition of Modern Art, remembered as the Armory Show. This series of the Woolworth Building showed Marins development to abstraction. They progressed from relatively naturalistic images of the building under construction to a sweeping gestural abstract image of the completed skyscraper. They were first shown in New York, and later in Boston and Chicago. It marked the beginning of a national reputation. Many writers, avant-garde and conservative, testified to Marin's talent.

During the summers, Marin and his family would travel to Maine, a perfect place for the artist to work in peace. On the teeming sidewalks of New York, the artist often drew on inexpensive writing pads—relatively affordable when bought in bulk. These writing pads would, later on, serve as the starting point for his artworks. In rural, undisturbed places, on the other hand, he simply made watercolors on the spot without a preparatory sketch. In 1915, Marin went to Small Point in Maine, intrigued by the juxtaposition there of sea and forest. Unfortunately, there are only a few drawings left from his Maine period. The same year he shocked his Stieglitz by spending his whole year's income to buy an island of small point Harbor. The little forested island proved to be an impractical place to live on since it had no source of water, but Marin would visit it often to paint it. Over the years he would gradually move further north to more and more remote areas, first to Deer Island and in the 1930s to remote Cape Split, where the artist purchased a family home.

By the 1930s, however, Marin's focus shifted from the arrival of landmarks upon the changing skyline to the ambient energy of the streets. In 1928, he made a lot of sketches from crowded clutches of pedestrians amid traffic and electric signs in canyon-like crossings. The lyrical, watery works seemed to be gone completely. He replaced them with a new emphasis on line or as Marin phrases it in a letter, 'movements in paint controlled by lines'. Eventually, in his final years, Marin finds watercolor unsuitable for the sensations provoked by such complex terrain. He needed the weight and manipulative properties of oils. The surface of these oil paintings demonstrated an exciting combination of flat and impasto, of wet-in-wet strokes as well as lines brushed onto dry areas—each aspect contributing to an overall effect of cacophony and movement. These late oils would profoundly impact the next generation of American Abstract Expressionists.

Marin died in 1953 at his summer home in Addison, Maine. His works can be found in the John Marin Collection, Colby College Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, The National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C; among many others.

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