Movement: Fifth Avenue

In this groundbreaking watercolor, the spire of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral appears on the left, and the Forty- Fourth Street clock is on the right. To communicate his excitement over the buildings, Marin aggressively blotted and reapplied color to build up tonal planes. Combining staccato marks to denote windows with soft, wet applications in the sky, he added long vertical stokes conveying the upward lift of the structures. Making the road in the foreground arc up as if the earth itself were heaving, he surrounded the dark blue patches and lines with slivers of bright white paper. Overhead, the pink rays of the sun, like the hands of the clock, leave the unmistakable impression of New York at midmorning.