Street Scene (Venice?) c. 1907

John Marin’s watercolor, Street Scene (Venice?), probably made sometime in the first half of the 20th century, captures the way the city must have felt to him. There’s a wonderful dissolution of form that suggests movement, a sense of time passing. I can imagine Marin standing there on the street, squinting in the Venetian light, trying to capture a fleeting moment. The pastel colors are amazing: the soft blues and greens of the buildings are built up with many translucent layers, achieving a strange, shimmering haze. Everything feels light and airy, as if the scene could dissolve at any moment. The lines are so tentative and searching, a bit like a Cy Twombly or a Morandi, finding form and dissolving it again. It's a dance between representation and abstraction, a dialogue Marin shared with many of his modernist contemporaries. That little smudge of red near the middle – is it a person, a hat, a memory? Painting at its best, you know?