West Shore Docks, Weehawken, New Jersey
<p>Upon his return to Weekawken in 1910, Marin created a work in which he handled watercolor in the fluid, flooded manner of his Tyrolean landscapes. Like those mountain scenes, this watercolor was constructed in horizontal bands, with an expanse of paper left nearly empty in the middle ground, where the pale stains of wiped, blotted color evoke the dull glare of the river’s surface. This free wet-into-wet application appears in numerous other Weehawken images in which Marin allowed his colors to bleed into each other, giving the scenes of river commerce the soft glow of wintry dawn light. Here Marin’s vantage point high on the riverbank encouraged him to flatten the composition; the shapes of the Weehawken piers extend upward along the picture plane rather than leading the eye into deep space.</p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 1910
- Dimensions
- Max: 27.6 × 21.8 cm (10 7/8 × 8 5/8 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
- Max: 27.6 × 21.8 cm (10 7/8 × 8 5/8 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-1910-134378
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified