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1. 1 media/b John Marin.jpg 2017-12-13T12:20:03-08:00 Elizabeth Horner 0a58463282c8174eba50dc8c23ac40cfc0cb6a3a John Marin's Etchings Elizabeth Horner 12 Liz Horner plain 2017-12-13T14:13:14-08:00 Elizabeth Horner 0a58463282c8174eba50dc8c23ac40cfc0cb6a3a

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1. 1 media/b John Marin.jpg 2017-12-13T12:20:03-08:00 Elizabeth Horner 0a58463282c8174eba50dc8c23ac40cfc0cb6a3a John Marin's Etchings 22 Liz Horner plain 2017-12-14T10:44:14-08:00 Elizabeth Horner 0a58463282c8174eba50dc8c23ac40cfc0cb6a3a

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• 1 media/b John Marin.jpg 2017-12-13T12:20:03-08:00 John Marin's Etchings 21 Liz Horner plain 2017-12-14T10:43:41-08:00 Marin’s New York etchings are among his most celebrated. He printed the majority of his etchings himself, as he liked to experiment with producing multiple effects from a single plate.[1] Interestingly, Marin’s etchings of the Woolworth Building are from a similar point of view to those used in his watercolors.[2] In both watercolor and etching, the emphasis of the works is the effect that the Woolworth Building has on its surroundings, not the actual structure itself. Marin focuses on creating an equilibrium between what he thought of as dynamic forms, a point of view evident from his note in the 1913 Exhibition Guide.
  
  The images that Marin produced of the Woolworth Building demonstrate a measure of chaos, but one feels as if that chaos is contained within the frame. This interpretation connects with the inconclusiveness of contemporary skyscraper criticism discussed above. In black and white, the etchings are more visually striking than the watercolors. One gets a greater sense of the multitude of forces at play that Marin mentioned in the 1913 Exhibition Guide. In  from 1913, Marin etches lines in the sky that make it look as if the tower is giving off energy. This fits well with Marin’s interpretation that buildings were alive, and that they would have an effect on their surroundings by emanating an energy-like force.
  
  The etched lines serve a second purpose: to frame the tower and thereby balancing the composition. Their inclusion prevents the Woolworth Building tower from outright dominating the composition, an effect that Marin also achieves in his watercolors through use of color washes. His  from 1912 is an example of this: the lines of blue and overall blue color wash are a softer version of Marin’s etched lines of energy in Woolworth Building (The Dance). Interpreting their inclusion as a balancing force is in line with Marin’s belief that smaller masses did exert a degree of resistance against larger masses – what he described as the “the warring of the great and the small.”[3]
  
  In the etchings, one loses a sense of the Gothic ornament on the building’s façade. Scholars of the Skyscraper Gothic point to the moralizing purpose of this detailing – the Gothic style of architecture being associated with medieval churches and “lending the moral authority of Christianity to the commercialism of the modern age.”[4] The visual association with the Gothic tradition enhanced Woolworth’s civic identity, and by denying this, Marin further undermines the association between the building and the man who financed its construction.
  
  
   

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  [1] Jessica Murphy, “John Marin,” in Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe. ed. Lisa Mintz Messenger (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001): 158.

  [2] Martha Tedeschi, “Great Forces at Work: John Marin’s New York,” in John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism. ed. Martha Tedeschi and Kristi Dahm. (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2010), 116.

  [3] John Marin, The Selected Writings of John Marin. ed. Dorothy Newman (New York: Pellegrini & Cudahy, 1949), 4-5.
  [4] Kevin D. Murphy and Lisa Reilly. “Introduction,” in Skyscraper Gothic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 9.
  
  Liz Horner