Barbara Haskell put the present work into context of Marin's thoughts on realism and abstraction:

As John Marin noted, "I don't paint rocks, trees, houses, and all things seen. I paint an inner vision." His Red and Green and Blue, Autumn, with its high-keyed color and interpenetrating forms, celebrated the invisible flux and energy he felt in nature and the omnipresent tensions and balances he believed connected all things [Barbara Haskell, The Image of Modernism: Selections from a Private Collection (2008), no. 26].

Nanette Maciejunes remarked upon similar themes in the work:

Marin also spoke frequently of his artistic struggle to achieve in his paintings a "Blessed Equilibrium" between the forces of dynamism and those of stability and control. Beginning in the 1920s, he began to explore ways to contain and enframe his images with directional lines and his frame-within-a-frame device that asserted the painting as a flat, two-dimensional object, yet allowed it to remain connected to an actual experience in the world. A critic's observation once that Marin painted not from the visible world that lay before his eyes but from an inner vision offended the artist deeply and was summarily dismissed by him as "rubbish." Non-objective abstraction he declared to be "self-indulgent." To Marin the inner vision was irrevocably linked to the artist's response to the visual experience [Julie Augur and Nanette V. Maciejunes, What it Meant to be Modern, 1910 - 1965 (2016), pp. 26-27].

The distinction is a fine one, and perhaps no other watercolor in Marin's extensive oeuvre tests the thesis more than the present work. Red and Green and Blue, Autumn, is a passionate play of color in almost entirely pure form. Marin is often credited as being the first painter in America to reach abstraction in his Weehawken Series—and the present work goes further than those works of the preceding decade. Fiery, spontaneous marks of line and color were precisely what endeared Marin to the generation of Abstract Expressionists decades later, but Marin nonetheless hewed to his cautious flirtation with pure abstraction. The extreme energy the work releases is very aptly described by its title: three colors, almost entirely unmoored from form or reality, bound together by the simple assertion of a time and place: autumn.