Still Life: Mexico

Marsden Hartley painted Still Life: Mexico in 1932-33, when he visited Mexico City and Cuernavaca. Mexico had a profound impact on Hartley's art, and his paintings acquired a spiritual, primitive aspect that was unusually intense. B. Haskell has writtten, "But Mexico did stimulate his growing focus on the inner life. Encouraged by his readings in occult literature and by his fascination with the esoteric rituals of the Aztec and Mayan cultures, he wholeheartedly embraced the field of the imagination. 'I have taken Blake's advice which I took years ago and was proceeding to following it, when I slipped off into thinking that mind was everything when god knows it has proved itself an idiot often enough in these times. In other words I am really going to try to do now what I indicated in the 1913-15 period when I swung off into space and made pictures of just shapes and movements which had very definite approval at that time; I should have been less emotional when an occultist woman came to see my pictures, and said 'you don't realize what you are doing in these pictures, they are full of cabalistic signs; I will now far better know what I am employing in the way of symbols when I use them.'" (Marsden Hartley, New York, 1980, p. 93)

Still Life: Mexico reflects these very issues that Hartley grappled with during his Mexican period. The composition is painted with a bold, intense palette that vibrates with visual power. The paint handling in the flowers at the center of the composition is muscular and strong, with brushstrokes laid down in a direct, forceful manner. He has outlined in black the terracotta vase holding the flowers. This visual device lends the flowers above a totemic quality that evokes Hartley's ongoing attraction to the iconic, spiritual power of images.