Lot Essay
The dynamic New York City watercolors of John Marin, such as 1928's A Street Seeing, are the artist's most noted works, along with his renderings of Maine. He began to paint his reactions to modern Manhattan about 1911 and continued nearly to the end of his life in 1953. The artist's writings in Camera Work (April-July 1913, p. 18), attempt to explain these tumultuous cityscapes, with their kaleidoscopes of straining buildings and bridges, to the uninitiated, as these excerpts of the essay reveal:
You cannot create a work of art unless the things you behold respond to something within you. Therefore, if these buildings move me, they too must have life. Thus the whole city is alive; buildings, people, all are alive; and the more they move me the more I feel them to be alive.
It is this 'moving of me' that I try to express...In life all things come under the magnetic influences of other things; the bigger assert themselves strongly, the smaller not so much, but still they assert themselves, and though hidden they strive to be seen and in doing so change their bent and direction.
While these powers are at work pushing, pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife and there is great music being played.
According to Sheldon Reich, "Marin again concerned himself with the speed and tempo of the city as defined by repetition of motifs and blurring of forms and the liberal use of dynamic diagonals, e. g., Street Crossing and A Street Seeing, 1928" (p. 173). Reich's words indicate that A Street Seeing is among the artist's most mature and controlled works: "...Marin, submitting his emotions to the discipline of formal analysis, had arrived at a more concentrated means of expressing his reaction to the hectic pace of the metropolis" (p. 174).
A Street Seeing was among the first works to reveal a new interest in the human figure that would blossom during the next decade. In her book John Marin, Ruth E. Fine points out: "Starting in the late 1920s and increasingly in the 1930s, the figural motif took its place in the paintings as well. That he was a close observer of the shapes and spaces and rhythms created as people moved among the street vendors and parked cars below the El is evident in Middle Manhattan Movement Abstraction, Lower Manhattan (Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art) and Street Crossing, New York (Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C.), of 1928, both of which portray figures bustling
You cannot create a work of art unless the things you behold respond to something within you. Therefore, if these buildings move me, they too must have life. Thus the whole city is alive; buildings, people, all are alive; and the more they move me the more I feel them to be alive.
It is this 'moving of me' that I try to express...In life all things come under the magnetic influences of other things; the bigger assert themselves strongly, the smaller not so much, but still they assert themselves, and though hidden they strive to be seen and in doing so change their bent and direction.
While these powers are at work pushing, pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife and there is great music being played.
According to Sheldon Reich, "Marin again concerned himself with the speed and tempo of the city as defined by repetition of motifs and blurring of forms and the liberal use of dynamic diagonals, e. g., Street Crossing and A Street Seeing, 1928" (p. 173). Reich's words indicate that A Street Seeing is among the artist's most mature and controlled works: "...Marin, submitting his emotions to the discipline of formal analysis, had arrived at a more concentrated means of expressing his reaction to the hectic pace of the metropolis" (p. 174).
A Street Seeing was among the first works to reveal a new interest in the human figure that would blossom during the next decade. In her book John Marin, Ruth E. Fine points out: "Starting in the late 1920s and increasingly in the 1930s, the figural motif took its place in the paintings as well. That he was a close observer of the shapes and spaces and rhythms created as people moved among the street vendors and parked cars below the El is evident in Middle Manhattan Movement Abstraction, Lower Manhattan (Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art) and Street Crossing, New York (Phillips Collection, Washington, D. C.), of 1928, both of which portray figures bustling