A Favorite Painting 41

John Marin, Lower Manhattan 1922

For two years back in the early eighties, I walked past the Woolworth Building on Broadway in downtown Manhattan every workday, and rarely failed to be impressed. John Marin's painting is composed as a view looking down from the Woolworth Building, and captures the dynamic energy of the neighborhood, which probably changed little in the sixty years between (even if much of the detail of the physical geography evolved). The beauty of modern art is often found in the explicit action of the image, even where the details of realistic representation are cloudy or virtually non-existent. The genius of Marin's work is that it isn't hard, given just the clue of a title, to see exactly what he intended to depict, which is certainly true here (though perhaps subject to the viewer's familiarity with that milieu). The vitality of lower Manhattan (where one would find Wall Street, the Brooklyn Bridge, Park Row and City Hall) is abundantly clear in this painting; and even if you don't know the place, I'd imagine it hard to miss the vibrant character of Marin's subject, as displayed in this painting.