Aquarium, Battery Park and Hudson River, New York City c. 1928

This is a postcard, "Aquarium, Battery Park and Hudson River, New York City," made by Irving Underhill. The pale blues and creams feel like a memory, hazy, like a dream of another time. Looking at the marks, the water is made with these horizontal blue lines that give way to a smattering of what look like tiny white dashes, all these little commas suggesting waves, spray, movement. It's so different from the way we see water today in photographs. There's so much detail. These printed colors are pretty thin and flat, and they remind me of looking at a really great Josef Albers print, the way he made color so simple and yet so exact. In this piece the marks give way to a broader sense of form, and the architecture and the ships become almost abstract shapes, like a collage. It makes me wonder, what will our images look like in another hundred years?