For someone who proudly called himself the “painter of Maine,” Marsden Hartley certainly strayed far from the part of the world where he was born and raised and where he died. Claiming that his childhood in Maine was bleak and unhappy, he traveled throughout his life to places like Paris and Berlin and New Mexico—but in his last years would return to the state of his birth. The exhibition Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts originated at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, and has now made its way to the New Mexico Museum of Art, displaying some forty paintings and drawings by the artist, with the support of the Vilcek Foundation.
In the broadest terms, Hartley’s paintings fall into two main categories that do not seem to follow any chronological order: landscapes and what might be called symbolic abstractions. The more immediately appealing of the two, although perhaps the less ambitious, are the landscapes. Often one senses in them the sort of symbolist emotionality and encroaching abstraction that we encounter in the later work of Albert Pinkham Ryder, another New England artist born about a generation earlier than Hartley. These works tend to be intimate in scale and deeply introspective in mood.
Through the expressionistic near abstraction of their formal language we sense a harshness to the terrain and to the climate. His thickly impastoed view of Kezar Lake in Maine (1910), with a mountain rising above the water, has a subdued quality caused by late afternoon clouds that conceal the sun in a pale green sky. Likewise, his New Mexico Recollection #14, a desert scene, is similarly overcast and set in a minor key, despite its depiction of a ruddy desert.
His Mont Sainte-Victoire of 1927, with its serried taches, is an obvious homage to Cézanne, who often depicted the same mountain. At the same time, however, it invokes the synchronist painters of the earlier twentieth century in a way that feels very American. The other part of Marsden Hartley’s production is represented in the present exhibition by works like Schiff (Ship) in which highly schematic forms, stylishly flattened into two dimensions, convey, in an almost humorous tone, such elementary objects as sun and waves, a sailing ship, and what look like
aquatic plants.
This work, from 1915, dates to the two years Hartley spent in Berlin and represents a momentary rejection of that more intimate tone with which he began and to which, as the present show details, he would soon return to memorable effect.
—James Gardner
Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts • New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe • to July 20 • nmartmuseum.org
