This path was created by Elizabeth Horner. The last update was by Parker Temple.
John Marin's New York
While Marin adopts the same perspective used in contemporary commercial images of the New York City skyline, which was a view from the water or framing a skyscraper with other buildings, he subverts this mode of representation by destabilizing the Woolworth Building in both his watercolors and etchings. This subversion of perspective creates a pictorially contained chaos, one that reflects the energy of the dynamic city and the artist’s ambivalent feelings about it.
Marin could see the Gothic skyscraper from his home at the northeast corner of Twenty-Eighth Street and Fourth Avenue.[1] One has to ask, why did Marin choose the Woolworth Building to represent the various factors mentioned? Simply put, the skyscraper was a uniquely American symbol of modernity, and seen as a physical reflection of the energy of urban life. As the tallest building in the skyline, the Woolworth Building was something with which the people of New York would be familiar. By employing a recognizable symbol to ground his compositions, Marin enables other people to read the visual expression of his thoughts and feelings.
New York City was alive to John Marin, something that was both exciting and scary at times. This ambivalent feeling about the city contributes to the creation of dynamic images that feel a bit chaotic. Quite aptly, MacKinley Helm said, “Art was a mystical something between Manhattan and Marin.”[2] One senses genuine reaction in Marin’s images of New York City, and Marin expressed a desire to visually represent the emotions that the city evoked in him. Marin was “unable to regard anything as ‘inanimate’,” as he thought that there was “life and motion even in the steel, brick and mortar high buildings of a great city.”[3] One can assume that he felt this way about the Woolworth. Alfred Stieglitz once noted that “Marin had fallen in love with [the Woolworth] at first sight,” making it no surprise that Marin returned to the motif many times.[4]
The most insightful text for interpreting Marin’s images of the Woolworth Building is his note in the Exhibition Guide for a show at 291 in 1913.
“The later pictures of New York shown in this exhibition may need the help of an explanation. These few words are written to quicken your response to my point of view. Shall we consider the life of a great city as confined simply to the people and animals on its streets and in its 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; buildings, people, all are alive; and the more they move me the more I feel them to be alive. It is this ‘moving of me’ that I try to express, so that I may recall the spell I have been under and behold the expression of the different emotions that have been called into being. How am I to express what I feel so that its expression will bring me back under the spells? Shall I copy facts photographically? I see great forces at work; great movements; the large buildings and the small buildings; the warring of the great and the small; influences of one mass on another greater or smaller mass. Feelings are aroused which give me the desire to express the reaction of these ‘pull forces,’ those influences which play with one another; great masses pulling smaller masses, each subject in some degree to the other’s power. In life all things come under the magnetic influence of other things; the bigger assert themselves strongly, the smaller not so much, but still they assert themselves, and though hidden they strive to be seen and in so doing change their bent and direction. While these powers are at work pushing, pulling, sideways, downwards, upwards, I can hear the sound of their strife and there is great music being played. / And so I try to express graphically what a great city is doing. Within the frames there must be a balance, a controlling of these warring, pushing, pulling forces. This is what I am trying to realize. But we are all human.”[5]
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