Sooner or later, everyone who writes about John Marin gets around to mentioning the 1948 Look magazine poll of 68 critics, curators and museum directors who, when asked to name America's greatest living painters, put him at the top of the list. Five years later, the headline of Mr. Marin's New York Times obituary described him as "Artist Considered by Many as 'America's No. 1 Master.' " No less a highbrow than the art critic Clement Greenberg concurred, predicting that Mr. Marin and Jackson Pollock would "compete for recognition as the greatest American painter of the 20th century."

John Marin was once expected to stand among the greatest American painters of the 20th century. Corbis

So why does Mr. Marin so often get the "John Who?" treatment? For it's better than even money that unless you happen to be a connoisseur of American modernism or an art-history major, his name is unknown to you. It's been 21 years since a major U.S. museum last put together a full-scale retrospective of his work. New York's Museum of Modern Art owns 25 Marins—but not a single one of them is currently on view.

To be sure, Mr. Marin has his share of passionate admirers, and important Marin exhibitions have just been simultaneously mounted by two medium-size U.S. museums, Maine's Portland Museum of Art (through Oct. 10) and Atlanta's High Museum of Art (through Sept. 11). The catalogs of both shows are highly impressive pieces of work, and between them they make a powerful case for taking a second look at Mr. Marin—but their authors are quick to admit that such a look is now necessary, since Mr. Marin has in recent years fallen into something not far removed from obscurity. Indeed, the foreword to Portland's "John Marin: Modernism at Midcentury" catalog goes so far as to describe him as "the missing man among the pantheon of great American modernists."

As I strolled through the Portland show the other day, I found myself wondering yet again how so explosively vital a painter could have dropped off the scope. A bold colorist who viewed the American landscape through the kaleidoscopic prism of cubism, Mr. Marin conveyed with identical precision and sympathy the nervous angularity of lower Manhattan ("City Movement," 1940) and the ceaseless turmoil of the waves that break on the coast of Maine ("Outer Sand Island, Maine," 1936). Like all prolific artists, he was uneven in inspiration, but having seen dozens of his watercolors—he painted some 2,500 of them—I'm struck by how many are not just effective but indelibly memorable.


But there may be a deeper reason. Americans have long had an equivocal relationship with their own art. At the turn of the 20th century, when Mr. Marin was learning his craft, it was taken for granted that the only way for American artists to do worthy work was to imitate European art. By the time of his death in 1953, homegrown modernism was coming into its own, but postwar connoisseurs were increasingly suspicious of distinctively American artists who failed to partake of the "international style" of art, be it in architecture, abstract painting, classical music or anything else. To this day there is a noticeable reluctance on the part of native-born art lovers to admit that a quintessentially American composer like Aaron Copland might actually be great, or that a stage actor need not have an English accent to perform the plays of Shakespeare or Stoppard. Could it be that the reputation of Mr. Marin, whose subject matter is as American as his briskly improvisational brushwork, suffers from our nagging sense of cultural inferiority?

Whatever the reason, Mr. Marin's stock appears at long last to be on the rise. In October the Metropolitan Museum will be showing a good-size chunk of its Marin holdings as part of "Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O'Keeffe," an exhibition of works from Alfred Stieglitz's personal art collection that were given to the Met in 1949. Alas, the press release for that show makes only passing mention of Mr. Marin, but at least it will be possible once again for New Yorkers to see enough of his paintings to know how very, very good he was.

I suspect that Mr. Marin would have appreciated the compliment of being exhibited in bulk at the Met six decades after his death. In 1936 he endearingly admitted to a friend that after a visit to that museum's 15th-century Flemish galleries, he asked himself, "Marin, you are a mighty fine fellow, but do you know your job as well as those old boys did, and will your stuff last as long?" He did—and it will.
