John Marin's Brooklyn Bridge

John Marin’s etching, Brooklyn Bridge (1913), distinctly and immediately conveys the famed hustle of life in New York City. The cars on the road appear to fly over the bridge, whose structure shakes and surface warps in the tumult. The sky is filled with movement from sweeping cuts and patches of cross-hatching, while a sole pedestrian is huddled up as he scuttles across the span, clutching at his jacket and the railing for support.

This seems to suggest a change in times, with the speeding cars leaving the pedestrian standing still. Marin had returned to New York from a sojourn in Paris only two years prior to the completion of this work, and the introduction of motorcars must have seemed to multiply the energy of the notoriously bustling city exponentially.

But even before this advancement in technology, the bridge was the symbolic and literal embodiment of movement, change, and (technological) progress in the city. It opened up the greatest city in the world to itself, creating an energy that catapulted America into the twentieth century and consequentially into Marin’s work.