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Mari Andriessen has been called 'the sculptor of resistance'. A characterisation that is due to him for two reasons. His Haarlem home and studio were the base of the armed resistance during the Second World War. And after the liberation, he received a series of commissions to make monuments in memory of five traumatic years of war.

How different his career had started. Catholic by birth, he received his first commissions from Catholic circles. His art consisted of reliefs and small sculptures, executed in an austere, highly stylised language of form. This changed in the second half of the 1930s, when he also received other, non-religious commissions. His sculptures became freer and more spatial. In his depiction of the figures, he also focused more and more on gestures and posture. This strengthened the emotional component of his work.

A good example is 'The Dockworker' from 1952, a monument to the Amsterdam February Strike of 1941. The stocky figure, both legs firmly on the ground and hands almost clenched into fists in anger, expresses the resistance to the persecution of the Jews.

Andriessen's war monument in Scheveningen, dating from 1966, is of an entirely different order. The Marine Monument commemorates three thousand marines who died in the Second World War. No emotions here, but an abstracted history in stone. The large, red tuff stone sculpture on the slope leading to the Strandweg represents a naval ship in action. On the prow, a ship's officer peers through a pair of binoculars. Behind him, next to the gun turret, is a second figure. On the stern, a sailor is giving a flag signal.
It is one of the few examples of abstraction in his oeuvre, because Andriessen thought figuratively. But it shows that the artist was open to other movements in sculpture and was able to transform a new language of form into his own visual language.

In connection with the redevelopment of the Scheveningen boulevard, the Marinemonument was stored for several months in 2021. In early May 2022, the monument was given a temporary location on a dune a little further away.