Formal Change in Recent American Painting

Abstract

An American art historian writes in 1888 of a painting done seven years before by his fellow countryman, Carl Marr. He notes that the title given it is “Mystery.” Such prompting leads him to speculate over the way the girl lying upon the beach may have met her death. He at length concludes: “It is all a mystery, and the painter leaves it where life leaves it, unexplained but pathetic in the extreme, and full of poetry in its deep-blue sky and watching stars and surging sea, its loneliness and desolation, its contrast between living and dead, between youth and age, between beauty and the wreck of wasting years.”¹