Building
<p>A new addition to the topography of downtown New York was the Trinity Building, occupying a full block between Broadway and Trinity Place. This massive tower was ornamented in the Gothic style, which Marin took pains to detail in the careful pencil sketch he made on this sheet. Later, perhaps indoors, he added light washes to the skyscraper’s facade to give it solidity, yet he realized the thin sketchbook paper would support neither heavier applications of paint and water nor scraping and heavy wiping. Instead, he communicated a sense of energy by lightly skipping the tip of his brush, loaded with blue, purple, and yellow pigments, across the bottom of the sheet. With these simple, nonobjective marks, Marin conjured the dynamism of the street.</p>
Catalogue
- Year
- 1910
- Medium
- Watercolor and graphite on lightweight, smooth, cream wove paper, laid down on white wove card
- Dimensions
- 35.5 × 25.4 cm (14 × 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
- Medium
- Watercolor and graphite on lightweight, smooth, cream wove paper, laid down on white wove card
- Dimensions
- 35.5 × 25.4 cm (14 × 10 in.)
- Watts ID
- WW-1910-134391
Source
- Collection
- Art Institute of Chicago
- Source
- aic
- Reference
- View at source
- Status
- verified