Visitors to the American pavilion at Venice's 25th biennial show of contemporary art, which opened this week, might well conclude that the U.S. boasts one great painter and six more-or-less indecipherable ones. The State Department had ducked the controversial honor of picking the U.S. entries; instead, the job had been done by officials of the Art Foundation of New York and Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art.
The pavilion's better half was devoted to John Marin, a wry, shy old crow of a man who paints nature as knowingly as Winslow Homer and with even...
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