Framing John Marin
POSTED BY Katie R., ON April 12, 2011, 1 COMMENTS
When John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism closes this Sunday, it’s not only the end of the exhibition but the culmination of years of work by the museum’s conservation department. Robby S. first exposed readers to the evolution of Marin’s frames and the import of framing to his oeuvre, but in this video, you get a better sense of the level of craftsmanship and preparation it took to both conserve the original frames and recreate frames in Marin’s aesthetic. While some of Marin’s frames may look deceptively simple, the process of researching, constructing, and painting them was labor-intensive and time-consuming.
Rergarding the frames, I noticed last Sunday that quite a few of them looked a bit worse for wear – but the paintings are so powerful, it didn’t make any difference.
Now that all the pieces are back in the Print Study Room, I wonder whether I will ever see them all displayed together again in my lifetime.
The Indianapolis Museum of Art has a permanent display, the “Turner Suite”, for their large collection of J.M.W. Turner watercolors, and I’m wondering why the AIC doesn’t have also have a small room that would cycle through its outstanding collection of Marin, always showing a few pieces from each decade of his life, without exposing any one piece for more than a few months at a time.
If Marin really is considered “a leading figure in modern art– and– “an influence on the Abstract Expressionist Movement”, that would seem to be an appropriate use for one of the smaller rooms in the Modern Wing.