John Marin's approach to landscape was inspired by the angularity and flattened space of Cubism and by his great sensitivity to nature's rhythms. He developed his own style of rapid brushwork, which captured the spirit of the moment and the dynamics of a ceaselessly transforming world.
In Hurricane, Marin conveys an immediate feeling of the ocean's turbulent nature. Though he painted this canvas from his summer home on the coast of Maine, his depiction of wind, water, and clouds is not tied to any specific locale. The intimate qualities of nature and the ever-changing characteristics of weather also played a vital role in the work of Alfred Stieglitz, the photographer and art dealer who gave Marin his first important exhibition; Marin was a core member of Stieglitz's circle of avant-garde artists. In a letter to Caroline Marmon Fesler, whose estate donated this work to the IMA, Stieglitz reports that an English sailor, standing before this painting in his gallery, had said it was the first time he had "really seen a sea painted as the sea really is."
Marin is best known for his watercolors, but Hurricane demonstrates the effectiveness of his work in oils. In the 1930s, he developed an interest in oil painting and began to concentrate on the expressive qualities of brushwork and the ruggedness the medium made possible.
The sea that I paint may not be the sea, but it is a sea, not an abstraction.
-John Marin, 1949
