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Lot Essay
The dynamism of the urban landscape was a constant muse for John Marin, one of America's most important modernist painters. At the time Street Movement, New York City was painted, 1934, the city had recently witnessed the realization of two remarkable feats of engineering and a depression-era competition between two moguls bent on constructing the world's tallest edifice. Eventually, the Empire State Building edged out the Chrysler Corporation's new New York headquarters for the title. But the two grand skyscrapers' rapid development is emblematic of just the growth and life that Marin commented New York constantly exuded. He wrote "Shall we consider the life of a great city as confined simply to the people and animals on its streets and in the buildings? Are the buildings themselves dead? We have been told somewhere that a work of art is a thing alive. 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 -- and the more they move me the more I feel them to be alive." (John Marin by John Marin, ed. Cleve Gray, New York, p. 105)
Ralph Flint, a contemporary critic, wrote in 1930 about one of Marin's cityscapes: "He has apparently been studying the moving throngs of pedestrians and motors that color and clog the New York streets and has woven the elements of this ceaseless tide of form into hieroglyphic patterns of unusual richness and interest...Perhaps it is beyond the reach of the pictorial arts to capture the blazing electrical panorama of such a scene, but if any man is entitled to have a try at it, it is John Marin." (as quoted in R. Fine, John Marin, New York, 1990, p. 145)
The same reaction could apply to the present work. A gray-blue frieze of people shuffles along the bottom of the work, anchoring it. Ruth Fine writes "groups of people crossing streets, at box offices, walking along the sidewalk became increasingly prominent in Marin's paintings and drawings as the 1930s progressed." (John Marin, p. 148) A row of low red and yellow buildings serves as a backdrop for this gray mass, and hints of taller buildings are portrayed with quickly drawn lines of color and single brushstrokes. Using one of his compositional trademarks, Marin gives the painting a jagged border. Because of the border's encroachment, the viewer feels the work is made up of smaller-than-the-whole overlapping snapshots, pasted together in a collage-like manner to create the total picture. A comment from Marin himself seems particularly apt, where Marin's vision for the work becomes final only after the arrangement of his vignettes: "A picture is complete when it is the completion of your seeing." (John Marin by John Marin, p. 113)
Ralph Flint, a contemporary critic, wrote in 1930 about one of Marin's cityscapes: "He has apparently been studying the moving throngs of pedestrians and motors that color and clog the New York streets and has woven the elements of this ceaseless tide of form into hieroglyphic patterns of unusual richness and interest...Perhaps it is beyond the reach of the pictorial arts to capture the blazing electrical panorama of such a scene, but if any man is entitled to have a try at it, it is John Marin." (as quoted in R. Fine, John Marin, New York, 1990, p. 145)
The same reaction could apply to the present work. A gray-blue frieze of people shuffles along the bottom of the work, anchoring it. Ruth Fine writes "groups of people crossing streets, at box offices, walking along the sidewalk became increasingly prominent in Marin's paintings and drawings as the 1930s progressed." (John Marin, p. 148) A row of low red and yellow buildings serves as a backdrop for this gray mass, and hints of taller buildings are portrayed with quickly drawn lines of color and single brushstrokes. Using one of his compositional trademarks, Marin gives the painting a jagged border. Because of the border's encroachment, the viewer feels the work is made up of smaller-than-the-whole overlapping snapshots, pasted together in a collage-like manner to create the total picture. A comment from Marin himself seems particularly apt, where Marin's vision for the work becomes final only after the arrangement of his vignettes: "A picture is complete when it is the completion of your seeing." (John Marin by John Marin, p. 113)