Buildings, One with Tower

Prints and Drawings

1910

John Marin
American, 1870-1953

Here Marin positioned himself looking south on Broadway toward Saint Paul’s Chapel and the Singer Building. He abandoned his earlier staccato, dotted application of color; instead, he chose a paper of heavier weight and texture and used more water, forsaking any preliminary graphite guide and allowing his washes to bleed into one another as in the Tyrol watercolors painted in the summer of 1910. Marin’s encounters with modern New York were intensified by his discussions about art with Stieglitz at 291. There he became acquainted not only with Stieglitz’s atmospheric photographs, but also with those of Edward Steichen and others in their circle whose emotive pictures of clouds, rain, snow, and steam encouraged him to pay attention to observation under different environmental conditions, as explored in this sheet.

Currently Off View: Prints and Drawings

Artist: John Marin
Title: Buildings, One with Tower
Origin: United States
Date: Made 1910
Medium: Watercolor with blotting and scraping, over graphite, on medium-weight, moderately textured, ivory wove paper (all edges trimmed), laid down on wood-pulp laminate board
Inscriptions: Signed, lower right, in blue watercolor: "Marin"; inscribed verso center of secondary support, in graphite: "40/42"; lower center, possibly by Stieglitz: "Marin/1910/AS"; lower edge: "John Marin Buildings, One With Tower 1910 Stieglitz Collection"; lower right corner: "6" [encircled]; stamped lower right, in blue ink: "CONDITION REPORT MADE" and in graphite "2/28/78"; upper left corner, in graphite: "2 x 2 x ?"; "22’" (?) [encircled]; "EL" (?)
Dimensions: 533 × 357 mm
Credit Line: Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Reference Number: 1956.382
Copyright: © 2018 Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Sheldon Reich, John Marin: A Stylistic Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (Tucson, 1970), p. 343, no. 10.18 (ill.).

Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, “Alfred Stieglitz: Known and Unknown,” June 2-Sept. 2, 2002.
Art Institute of Chicago, “John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism,” Jan. 19-Apr. 17, 2011, pp. 42, 100-01, pl. 25; traveled to the High Museum, Atlanta, June 26-Sept. 11, 2011.

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), New York; Stieglitz Estate (Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), executor); given to the Art Institute of Chicago, 1956.

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