A Seeing, New York c. 1921 - 1928

Curator: What a whirlwind! The energy practically leaps off the page. Editor: Indeed. This is John Marin’s “A Seeing, New York,” likely created between 1921 and 1928. He captured it using watercolor and colored pencil. Curator: Those blues feel very intentional amid all the shifting ochre. Do you get the sense of a modern metropolis on the move? Almost vibrating with activity. Editor: Absolutely. Notice how Marin doesn't present us with static buildings but rather uses fractured lines and planes. The geometry feels dynamic, suggesting constant flux. There's almost a symbolic language at play. Curator: Yes, look at those grid-like structures rendered in dark ink – almost hieroglyphic in their form. They represent skyscrapers, yet their depiction feels… destabilizing. Is Marin hinting at something beyond surface appearances? Perhaps the era’s anxieties? Editor: It's interesting to interpret them that way, given their solidity. Though his use of transparency, layering the washes of color one on top of another, subverts the usual expectation of watercolor as soft or purely decorative. Look at how it constructs form in opposition to pure representation, the formal tensions pull against any singular interpretation. Curator: That destabilization works as a kind of emblem for early 20th-century thought too – post-war, on the cusp of vast technological advancements and psychological insight. Perhaps this urban imagery became shorthand for inner turmoil. I almost see abstracted figures within these lines. Editor: I hadn't thought of it quite that way. This gives so much power to its composition; those fractured viewpoints are not just modernist affectation but communicate on this richer plane, about history. It pulls back so the individual mark makes it feel bigger somehow. Curator: In the end, Marin does more than just depict a city; he gives us an abstracted visual poem about it, inviting each of us to bring our own “seeing” to his New York. Editor: A whirlwind, exactly! And I find I can actually breathe a bit deeper looking at its textures than when we started out here today, thanks to these new connections.