West Forty-Second Street from Ferryboat

Prints and Drawings

1929

John Marin
American, 1870-1953

Marin’s interest in internal framing devices became increasingly significant in his watercolors of the 1920s. This large sheet, much admired and exhibited during the artist’s lifetime, captures the waterfront through a window on the Weehawken Ferry. Marin painted the upper edge to resemble a rolled canvas window covering, employing a playful trompe l’oeil manner. Equally improvisational is the artist’s inclusion of a pink mountain range beyond the New York skyline, which equates nature’s grand peaks and valleys with the soaring towers and narrow canyons of the urban landscape.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Prints and Drawings

Artist: John Marin
Title: West Forty-Second Street from Ferryboat
Origin: United States
Date: 1929
Medium: Watercolor with wiping, blotting, and scraping, and with black colored pencil, black crayon, and graphite, on moderately thick (estimated), slightly textured, ivory wove paper (all edges trimmed) perimeter mounted to wood-pulp board faced with cream wove paper, in original frame
Inscriptions: Signed and dated lower right, in blue watercolor, over graphite: “Marin 29”
Dimensions: 549 × 663 mm; 583 × 753 mm (secondary support)
Credit Line: Alfred Stieglitz Collection
Reference Number: 1949.568
Copyright: © 2018 Estate of John Marin / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

America and Alfred Stieglitz (New York, 1943), pl. XVIII D
Sheldon Reich, John Marin, Part II: Catalogue Raisonné (Tucson, Ariz., 1970), p. 616, no. 29.71(ill).
Judith A. Barter, Sarah E. Kelly, Denise Mahoney, Ellen E. Roberts, and Brandon K. Ruud, American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 107-9, cat. 38 (color ill.).Judith A. Barter et al., “American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955,” (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2009), cat.
Hedy Weiss, “John Marin —Watercolors a vivid world portrait at Art Institute of Chicago” Chicago SunTimes (April 28, 2011), accessed May 2, 2011, http://www.suntimes.com/entertainment/3507159-452/story.html (not repro).

New York, An American Place, “John Marin,” Nov. 1930, one of nos. 1-8 as “New York, From In and Around the City”
New York, Museum of Modern Art, “John Marin,” 1936, cat. 120
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, “History of American Watercolor Painting,” Jan. 27- Feb. 25, 1942, cat. 174
Art Institute of Chicago, “Alfred Stieglitz, His Photographs and His Collection,” Feb. 2-29 1948, no cat.
Art Institute of Chicago, “John Marin’s Watercolors: A Medium for Modernism,” Jan. 19-Apr. 17, 2011, pp. 55, 71, 73, 126, 129, fig. 59a, pl. 55; 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, 1949.

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