New York with View of the Flatiron Building
<p>This lively work painted over a graphite sketch is a view looking down Broadway to the Flatiron Building at the corner of Twenty-Third Street and Fifth Avenue. The tall, narrow structure, seven blocks from Stieglitz’s gallery 291, was also the subject of photographs by Marin’s friends Stieglitz and Edward Steichen. This sheet demonstrates Marin’s increasingly fluid handling of paint, particularly where he pulled his brush, loaded with blue wash, around the tops of the buildings. Tilting the paper upright, he allowed the watercolor to pool at the end of each stroke, creating a vibrant pattern of gradating tone.</p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 1910
- Dimensions
- 33.9 × 25.4 cm (13 3/8 × 10 in.)
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Artist
- John Marin
Artist
Painting
John Marin was an American modernist painter and printmaker known for his dynamic watercolors and etchings of coastal landscapes, particularly Maine. Working primarily in watercolor from the 1910s onward, he developed a fractured, energetic visual language that synthesized Cubist fragmentation with direct observation of nature. His gestural brushwork and bold use of paper's white ground anticipated Abstract Expressionism while maintaining a strong sense of place and atmospheric condition. Marin spent decades based in Maine, where the rocky coastlines and maritime environment became the primary subject of his mature work.
Full artist profile →More
More by John Marin
Approaching Fog
1952 · Watercolor with blotting, wiping and traces of scraping, and with brush and black ink, graphite, fabricated charcoal, and touches of opaque watercolor on medium-weight, rough-textured, off-white wove paper (four edges trimmed)
Movement: Boats and Objects, Blue Gray Sea
1947 · Oil on canvas
Brooklyn Bridge - on the Bridge, No. 2
1944 · Etching
Cape Split, Maine
1941 · Watercolor with touches of blotting, and with graphite and black colored pencil, on lightweight (estimated), slightly textured, ivory wove paper (top, left and right edges trimmed), laid down on artists’ board faced with ivory wove paper, in original frame
Circus Elephants
1941 · Watercolor with scraping and wiping, and with opaque watercolor, graphite and black crayon, on medium-weight, slightly textured, cream laid paper
Movement: Sky and Grey Sea
1941 · Watercolor, charcoal, and pencil on paper
Record
Verified by WattsOS- Artist
- John Marin
- Year
- 1910
- Dimensions
- 33.9 × 25.4 cm (13 3/8 × 10 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-1910-134373
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified