拍品專文
James W. Lane, writing a review of "Recent Paintings of Maine by Marsden Hartley" at Hudson Walker's Gallery for the March 1940 Art News which he entitles "The Virile Paintings of Marsden Hartley," comes perilously close to where Hartley lives:
"Marsden Hartley's masculine, well-designed bluntness is the note at present...all strength and sinew, uncompromising and a bit crusty. Hartley gets right into the life of the Maine people..."
Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877, the youngest child and the only boy in a family of nine children. Whether or not there is in this fact any modern psychological justification for Hartley's fascination with tough, powerful subject matter, there is little room to suppose that he shrunk from it.
Hartley's life made a full circle before its close. He navigated the intricacies of post-impressionism, cubism, fauvism, symbolism, and expressionism before returning at the end of his life to Ellsworth Maine. Between his early visits in 1912 and 1915 to Paris and Berlin, where he experienced acute suffering as a result of his lover's death, and his final return to Maine, he searched continually for roots. He saw his native land as blighted, cold, sterile and unfriendly to the soul. However in 1943 he died there, at last satisfied to be himself.
During his life, Hartley turned to the dark literature of mysticism for themes. He made pictures of Christ surrounded by half-naked men, and of subjects which echo the deposition from the cross, and the entombment. He turned to portraits of American heroes like Lincoln who, he thought, were lionized by history but alone in their courageous moments. Hartley was supported in this through the generosity of Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Daniel and Hudson Walker and was thus able to carry on his aesthetic search for thirty years. He may be called a man of his times precisely because he shows forth in his life and work the period's most difficult intellectual conflicts.
Hartley spent the summer of 1930 at Franconia Notch, a terrain which was morally painful to him. In 1931 he found new energy among the glacial remains of the moraine of Gloucester's Dogtown, but he did not keep it long; a year later he was in Mexico, from which he fled in disillusionment. In 1938 Hartley returned to Maine where he painted the remarkable series he called the "Archaic Portraits," depicting the Nova Scotian family whose two sons were drowned at sea.
Barbara Haskell notes that in this series, Hartley "abandoned his habit of painting from memory to work directly from his subject, a French- Canadian light-heavyweight boxer he had met while living in Bangor....As with his 'Archaic Portraits,' Hartley simplified form into large shapes delineated by discrete areas of color....the design is less mannered with a rich scale of intermediate shades of bonded color." With each portrait, he felt "nearer to the truth - even more so than if I were trying to copy nature from the thing itself." But it was his very articulateness that defeated his effort to express himself. In Hartley's "Mt. Katahdin" series, he struggled to "do the mountain's portrait," to explain for himself the metaphor of man as mountain, mountain as man, and the two achieved in his mind a fluid interchangeability. The Madawaska, potent with physical energy, was as statuesque and iconic as Katahdin itself, looming like a giant, and no less indominatable.
The present picture is probably the first arrangement of The Madawaska, the second of which belonged to James Speyer, and was bequeathed at his death to the Art Institute of Chicago (see Haskell, p. 119, pl. 56).
This painting will be included in Gail Levin's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Hartley's work. It was executed in 1940.
"Marsden Hartley's masculine, well-designed bluntness is the note at present...all strength and sinew, uncompromising and a bit crusty. Hartley gets right into the life of the Maine people..."
Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877, the youngest child and the only boy in a family of nine children. Whether or not there is in this fact any modern psychological justification for Hartley's fascination with tough, powerful subject matter, there is little room to suppose that he shrunk from it.
Hartley's life made a full circle before its close. He navigated the intricacies of post-impressionism, cubism, fauvism, symbolism, and expressionism before returning at the end of his life to Ellsworth Maine. Between his early visits in 1912 and 1915 to Paris and Berlin, where he experienced acute suffering as a result of his lover's death, and his final return to Maine, he searched continually for roots. He saw his native land as blighted, cold, sterile and unfriendly to the soul. However in 1943 he died there, at last satisfied to be himself.
During his life, Hartley turned to the dark literature of mysticism for themes. He made pictures of Christ surrounded by half-naked men, and of subjects which echo the deposition from the cross, and the entombment. He turned to portraits of American heroes like Lincoln who, he thought, were lionized by history but alone in their courageous moments. Hartley was supported in this through the generosity of Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Daniel and Hudson Walker and was thus able to carry on his aesthetic search for thirty years. He may be called a man of his times precisely because he shows forth in his life and work the period's most difficult intellectual conflicts.
Hartley spent the summer of 1930 at Franconia Notch, a terrain which was morally painful to him. In 1931 he found new energy among the glacial remains of the moraine of Gloucester's Dogtown, but he did not keep it long; a year later he was in Mexico, from which he fled in disillusionment. In 1938 Hartley returned to Maine where he painted the remarkable series he called the "Archaic Portraits," depicting the Nova Scotian family whose two sons were drowned at sea.
Barbara Haskell notes that in this series, Hartley "abandoned his habit of painting from memory to work directly from his subject, a French- Canadian light-heavyweight boxer he had met while living in Bangor....As with his 'Archaic Portraits,' Hartley simplified form into large shapes delineated by discrete areas of color....the design is less mannered with a rich scale of intermediate shades of bonded color." With each portrait, he felt "nearer to the truth - even more so than if I were trying to copy nature from the thing itself." But it was his very articulateness that defeated his effort to express himself. In Hartley's "Mt. Katahdin" series, he struggled to "do the mountain's portrait," to explain for himself the metaphor of man as mountain, mountain as man, and the two achieved in his mind a fluid interchangeability. The Madawaska, potent with physical energy, was as statuesque and iconic as Katahdin itself, looming like a giant, and no less indominatable.
The present picture is probably the first arrangement of The Madawaska, the second of which belonged to James Speyer, and was bequeathed at his death to the Art Institute of Chicago (see Haskell, p. 119, pl. 56).
This painting will be included in Gail Levin's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Hartley's work. It was executed in 1940.