Executed in 1950, during the last years of John Marin’s life, New York Series: From Weehawken Heights is an audacious, almost entirely abstract rendering of one of the artist’s favorite subjects. Although Marin traveled widely throughout his career, he returned t.mes
and again to the hypnotic energy of New York City. The present work captures that energy—exuberant and complex—more so than it does the topography of the city.
"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? …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… 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."
The view of New York City from Weehawken Heights in New Jersey is an iconic one: a dynamic, sprawling skyline that towers over the Hudson River (see figure 1). Marin fractures and reorders this familiar scene in a kaleidoscope of black, blue and muted red brushstrokes that recall Jackson Pollock; even in this chaos, however, the silhouette of the Empire State Building remains intact (see figure 2). Marin's oscillation here between the abstract and figurative is a mature expression of his unique modernist principles.
