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Lot Essay
Grounded in a spiritual appreciation for the American landscape while also well-versed in European avant-garde experimentation, Hartley merged eclectic influences into a personal style reverberating with visceral energy. Inspired by his 1918-1919 sojourn in Santa Fe and Taos, New Mexico Landscape synthesizes Hartley’s emotional response to the Southwest into a Modernist evocation of color and form that draws comparisons to the work of Paul Cezanne and Georgia O’Keeffe, yet epitomizes Hartley’s own distinct poetic grit.
Born in Maine, Hartley’s early stitch-like landscapes captured the attention of famed photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who gave Hartley his first one-man show in New York in 1909. In 1912, Hartley traveled abroad to Paris and soon formed close relationships with key members of the French avant-garde, frequenting the salon of Gertrude Stein and immersing himself in Cubist circles. He particularly gravitated toward the up-and-coming German abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, traveling to Munich in 1913, meeting Kandinsky in person and settling in Germany until forced to leave in the midst of World War I. Hartley’s famed works from this period, including Portrait of a German Officer (1914, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), epitomize the unique combination of intensity and poeticism, loneliness, and fascination, that Hartley would continue to explore across subject matter for the rest of his career.
As Randall R. Griffey explains, “When wartime conditions forced Hartley to return to New York in December 1915…the artist set upon something of an odyssey to regain direction. A key stop along this journey in 1918-1919 was New Mexico, a place that prompted him to proclaim and to theorize a ‘New Realism’ rooted in landscape painting” (quoted in Marsden Hartley: The Earth is All I Know of Wonder, Humlebaek, 2019, p. 69). New Mexico was a place of discovery for artists of the era. The writer Mabel Dodge was establishing a community of intellectuals, and the Taos Society of Artists had recently been formed in 1915. Georgia O’Keeffe made her first brief trip to the region in 1917, but would not return with regularity to paint until 1929. While Hartley did not quite socially fit into this burgeoning artistic colony, he was immediately captivated by the landscape. Regarding the land as sacred and mysterious, he described, "any one of these beautiful arroyos and canyons is a living example of the splendor of the ages...and I am bewitched with their magnificence and their austerity; as for the color, it is of course the only place in America where true colour exists, excepting the short autumnal season in New England" (quoted in B. Haskell, Marsden Hartley, New York, 1980, p. 58).
While in New Mexico, Hartley first captured the topography with pastel, focusing on drawing the lines of the mountains, rivers and hills in pure pigment. As he explained, “The country of the southwest is essentially a sculptural country…The sense of form in New Mexico is for me one of the profoundest, most original, and most beautiful I have personally experienced” (quoted in Seeking the Spiritual: The Paintings of Marsden Hartley, Ithaca, 1998, p. 40). The influence of this linear approach is seen in the present work, as the foreground formation seems to almost rise in three dimensions as Hartley focuses on the bold outlines of the mountainous forms.
Hartley did not truly focus on capturing New Mexico in oil until he was back in New York from the fall of 1919 to the early summer of 1921. The present painting dates from this period back in the studio when Hartley created virile, emotionally wrought compositions to capture the full essence of his experience in the Southwestern expanse. With a dry, brushy surface yet brilliant color, Hartley reduces the topography to variegated bands of pigment punctuated by primordial mountains. The weighted, sculptural mass of the land forms is conveyed through deep tones of red and blue and heavy brushstrokes. The band of undulating mountains in the background and the syncopated brushstrokes of the landscape and sky create a visual rhythm that evokes the sensation of the dry breeze that drifts through the region.
The inherent energy of the work also derives from Hartley’s parallel brushwork influenced by the work of Cezanne. As Griffey describes, “In both paint and pastel, Hartley rendered the particular topography, the desert hills and arroyos with prismatic clarity modeled partly on the Post-Impressionist’s technique” (quoted in op. cit., 2019, p. 69). Indeed, Cezanne would prove to be a lasting influence on Hartley, who would go on to paint Mont Saint Victoire in the following decade. Artist Alex Katz has reflected of Hartley, “His vision is as strong as Cezanne’s. It is hard to see what Cezanne and Hartley saw in any other way than they did…[he] made many sensational paintings with substance, energy and power” (quoted in ibid., 2019, p. 82).
After completing this series of New Mexico oil paintings created in his New York studio, Hartley sold 117 paintings through the Anderson Galleries in 1921 to fund a return trip to Europe. The auction, which featured eleven Southwestern oils including the present work, successfully raised $4,000. Hartley left for Berlin shortly thereafter, but even while back abroad, the distinct spirit of New Mexico continued to haunt him. In 1923-1924, Hartley would return to the Southwestern landscape in a series of Berlin paintings known as the New Mexico Recollections, which take a darker, more stormy twist on the powerful imagery explored in the present work. As epitomized by New Mexico Landscape, Hartley’s work throughout his career transports the viewer outside of the everyday into the artist’s own viscerally profound lens on life and landscape.
Born in Maine, Hartley’s early stitch-like landscapes captured the attention of famed photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who gave Hartley his first one-man show in New York in 1909. In 1912, Hartley traveled abroad to Paris and soon formed close relationships with key members of the French avant-garde, frequenting the salon of Gertrude Stein and immersing himself in Cubist circles. He particularly gravitated toward the up-and-coming German abstraction of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc, traveling to Munich in 1913, meeting Kandinsky in person and settling in Germany until forced to leave in the midst of World War I. Hartley’s famed works from this period, including Portrait of a German Officer (1914, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), epitomize the unique combination of intensity and poeticism, loneliness, and fascination, that Hartley would continue to explore across subject matter for the rest of his career.
As Randall R. Griffey explains, “When wartime conditions forced Hartley to return to New York in December 1915…the artist set upon something of an odyssey to regain direction. A key stop along this journey in 1918-1919 was New Mexico, a place that prompted him to proclaim and to theorize a ‘New Realism’ rooted in landscape painting” (quoted in Marsden Hartley: The Earth is All I Know of Wonder, Humlebaek, 2019, p. 69). New Mexico was a place of discovery for artists of the era. The writer Mabel Dodge was establishing a community of intellectuals, and the Taos Society of Artists had recently been formed in 1915. Georgia O’Keeffe made her first brief trip to the region in 1917, but would not return with regularity to paint until 1929. While Hartley did not quite socially fit into this burgeoning artistic colony, he was immediately captivated by the landscape. Regarding the land as sacred and mysterious, he described, "any one of these beautiful arroyos and canyons is a living example of the splendor of the ages...and I am bewitched with their magnificence and their austerity; as for the color, it is of course the only place in America where true colour exists, excepting the short autumnal season in New England" (quoted in B. Haskell, Marsden Hartley, New York, 1980, p. 58).
While in New Mexico, Hartley first captured the topography with pastel, focusing on drawing the lines of the mountains, rivers and hills in pure pigment. As he explained, “The country of the southwest is essentially a sculptural country…The sense of form in New Mexico is for me one of the profoundest, most original, and most beautiful I have personally experienced” (quoted in Seeking the Spiritual: The Paintings of Marsden Hartley, Ithaca, 1998, p. 40). The influence of this linear approach is seen in the present work, as the foreground formation seems to almost rise in three dimensions as Hartley focuses on the bold outlines of the mountainous forms.
Hartley did not truly focus on capturing New Mexico in oil until he was back in New York from the fall of 1919 to the early summer of 1921. The present painting dates from this period back in the studio when Hartley created virile, emotionally wrought compositions to capture the full essence of his experience in the Southwestern expanse. With a dry, brushy surface yet brilliant color, Hartley reduces the topography to variegated bands of pigment punctuated by primordial mountains. The weighted, sculptural mass of the land forms is conveyed through deep tones of red and blue and heavy brushstrokes. The band of undulating mountains in the background and the syncopated brushstrokes of the landscape and sky create a visual rhythm that evokes the sensation of the dry breeze that drifts through the region.
The inherent energy of the work also derives from Hartley’s parallel brushwork influenced by the work of Cezanne. As Griffey describes, “In both paint and pastel, Hartley rendered the particular topography, the desert hills and arroyos with prismatic clarity modeled partly on the Post-Impressionist’s technique” (quoted in op. cit., 2019, p. 69). Indeed, Cezanne would prove to be a lasting influence on Hartley, who would go on to paint Mont Saint Victoire in the following decade. Artist Alex Katz has reflected of Hartley, “His vision is as strong as Cezanne’s. It is hard to see what Cezanne and Hartley saw in any other way than they did…[he] made many sensational paintings with substance, energy and power” (quoted in ibid., 2019, p. 82).
After completing this series of New Mexico oil paintings created in his New York studio, Hartley sold 117 paintings through the Anderson Galleries in 1921 to fund a return trip to Europe. The auction, which featured eleven Southwestern oils including the present work, successfully raised $4,000. Hartley left for Berlin shortly thereafter, but even while back abroad, the distinct spirit of New Mexico continued to haunt him. In 1923-1924, Hartley would return to the Southwestern landscape in a series of Berlin paintings known as the New Mexico Recollections, which take a darker, more stormy twist on the powerful imagery explored in the present work. As epitomized by New Mexico Landscape, Hartley’s work throughout his career transports the viewer outside of the everyday into the artist’s own viscerally profound lens on life and landscape.