In today’s superheated art market, art historical research is typically driven by a combination of intellectual curiosity and Mammon. It’s difficult to say who toils more assiduously—aspiring Ph.Ds seeking dissertation topics, established scholars wishing to deepen their insight, or art dealers in search of new material to sell. All of them mine neglected or underexplored territory in the hope of finding little known or undervalued treasure. You’d think there wouldn’t be much left to study, yet a substantial chunk of the landscape of American modernism still remains less than thoroughly examined. It’s an expanse of terrain extending roughly from the end of the Jazz Age to the entry of the United States into World War II.

From a political or sociological viewpoint, these years were obviously pivotal to American history, bracketing, as they do, the Great Depression of the 1930s, from the moment immediately preceding the collapse of the American economy, through the radical social reforms it provoked, to the early phase of recovery. From an art historical point of view, the 1930s, along with their prelude and aftermath, have often been labeled uneventful, even dull. Granted, the period falls between two of the sexiest eras in American modernism—the heady years of experimentation that followed the 1913 Armory Show’s introduction of European modernism to American artists and the exciting postwar decade when Abstract Expressionism came into its own. Yet there was no shortage of radically innovative American painters active during this in-between time. John Marin, Marsden