John Marin (1870-1953)

More consistently than any other American artist of the early twentieth century, John Marin captured the energy and dynamism of New York City. "Marin saw movement in his paintings not only as a sign of modernity, a means of capturing the quickening pace of life in the twentieth century. It was also for him a manifestation of the pulse and rhythm of life itself." (M.E. Ward, Richard York Gallery, Movement: Marin, New York, 2001, p. 7) The tempo of the city and its role as a center for modernist thinking were keys to Marin's immersion in its atmosphere. Starting in the late 1920s, and increasingly in the 1930s, Marin added the figural motif to his New York scenes. As evident in Mid-Manhattan II, Marin was a close observer of the shapes, spaces and rhythms created by the mass movement of people through the streets of the City.

Manhattan never lost its fascination for the artist, and throughout his life Marin revisited its panoramic stretch and diverse rhythms. He saw it as "a kind of bustling paradise and as one of the formative influences in his life. First in his watercolors and later in his oils, he observed it from many points of view and created vivid pictorial equivalents for the complex interrelation of its harsh angles, the impact of light on surfaces of glass and stone, the spatial tensions and the myriad contrasts of movement." (C.E. Buckley, John Marin in Retrospect: An Exhibition of his Oils and Watercolors, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and The Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, p. 10)