Immanuel Church, New Castle, Delaware: Distant View

The companion to the Close View, this Distant View of Immanuel Church places the building within its full context: the green, the surrounding trees, and the sky. The church that was a study in geometric form in the close view becomes a small vertical accent in a larger composition of sky, trees, and open space. The two paintings together demonstrate Marin's modernist method in miniature: the same subject yields completely different formal possibilities depending on the distance and crop.

Marin frequently painted the same subject from multiple viewpoints and distances, and the resulting series of paintings constitute a primer in modernist composition. Immanuel Church from close and from distant demonstrates that reality does not have a single correct representation — each viewpoint reveals a different set of formal relationships, and each is equally valid.

Immanuel Church: Distant View is the necessary complement to the Close View. Together they argue that a building is not one thing but many things, depending on where you stand. This is the fundamental modernist principle that Marin spent his career demonstrating.