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Lot Essay
One of the greatest visionaries of early twentieth-century art, Marsden Hartley’s travels left lasting impressions on his memory and inspired his bold and captivating paintings. Hartley’s most striking works bear powerful reverential qualities, recalling the people and places he once strongly connected with, such as his famous Portrait of a German Officer (1914, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and later his series known as the New Mexico Recollections of 1923-1924 that recalls his spiritual sojourn to the Southwest years earlier. Painted circa 1923-1926, Hartley’s dreamlike Compote of Fruit and Landscape amalgamates several sources of inspiration and combines two of the artist’s important recurring subjects: the landscape and the still life. Indeed, Margaret Breunig once wrote that the present work “has been assembled from a retentive memory and an inventive mind into a compelling abstraction” (M. Breuning, op. cit.,1960, p. 46).
Hartley painted still lifes throughout his career, drawing comparisons for his diverse compositions to artists as disparate as William Merritt Chase, Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Max Weber. For much of the 1920s, the artist studied the work of Paul Cézanne, whose influence is evident in works such as Compote of Fruit and Landscape. The dark shadowed outlines around the work’s forms and the various fruits carefully arranged in the foreground are all testaments to Hartley's regard for and interest in the French artist's work. Gail Scott writes, “Immersed so totally and passionately in his subject —whether a mountain, a tree, or an apple—Cezanne was able (as Hartley saw it) to reach a point of detached contemplation where artistic ego vanishes and the object stands for ultimate reality" (Marsden Hartley, New York, 1988, p. 76).
Hartley’s Cezannesque tabletop arrangement overlooks a dramatic mountainous landscape, creating an imaginative composition indicative of the deeply rooted creativity that pervaded his entire career. The present work also incorporates the artist’s lifelong interest in the monumental forms of clouds and mountains, from France to New Mexico, that come into focus in many of his most celebrated landscapes. The well-travelled artist experimented with a range of inventive subjects throughout his career, often imbued with palpable emotive qualities that reveal his impassioned awareness of the world around him, as evidenced by the highly original Compote of Fruit and Landscape.
Hartley painted still lifes throughout his career, drawing comparisons for his diverse compositions to artists as disparate as William Merritt Chase, Henri Matisse, André Derain, and Max Weber. For much of the 1920s, the artist studied the work of Paul Cézanne, whose influence is evident in works such as Compote of Fruit and Landscape. The dark shadowed outlines around the work’s forms and the various fruits carefully arranged in the foreground are all testaments to Hartley's regard for and interest in the French artist's work. Gail Scott writes, “Immersed so totally and passionately in his subject —whether a mountain, a tree, or an apple—Cezanne was able (as Hartley saw it) to reach a point of detached contemplation where artistic ego vanishes and the object stands for ultimate reality" (Marsden Hartley, New York, 1988, p. 76).
Hartley’s Cezannesque tabletop arrangement overlooks a dramatic mountainous landscape, creating an imaginative composition indicative of the deeply rooted creativity that pervaded his entire career. The present work also incorporates the artist’s lifelong interest in the monumental forms of clouds and mountains, from France to New Mexico, that come into focus in many of his most celebrated landscapes. The well-travelled artist experimented with a range of inventive subjects throughout his career, often imbued with palpable emotive qualities that reveal his impassioned awareness of the world around him, as evidenced by the highly original Compote of Fruit and Landscape.