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Lot Essay
Painted in New York in 1916 after his return from war-torn Europe, A Nice Time represents a departure from Marsden Hartley's European work which immediately precedes it, while continuing to develop the artist's long interest in color and his more recently adopted fascination with analytic cubism.
Painted with brilliant, saturated color, A Nice Time depicts a table-top still-life that includes a prominently placed blue cup and saucer, along with other more ambiguously rendered elements, such as a banana, a tomato, a folded napkin, and a flowering camellia. Enlivened by checker-board patterning, stripes, and flat planes of color, the composition also includes the words: "BON JOUR," "HAH," and the apparently nonsensical: "MLEAGNA." As with many of Hartley's cubist works, his symbolism here remains personal, mysterious and partly impenetrable.
Clearly the painting owes much to Hartley's earlier work, as well as other art of his time, especially the synthetic cubist works of Pablo Picasso. In formal terms, A Nice Time shares similarities with Hartley's earlier, "German Officer" paintings, which are also characterized by the same "flat areas of intense color, contained within discrete boundaries and laid against solid tonal fields." (Barbara Haskell, Marsden Hartley, New York, 1980, p. 42) According to Barbara Haskell, with the German Officer series, "Hartley became the first American artist to wholeheartedly and consistently adopt the vocabulary of synthetic cubism, a style which differed from analytic cubism is its reliance on combinations of flat, colored geometric shapes, rather than on the prismatic fragmentation of three dimensional forms." (Marsden Hartley, p. 44).
To his synthetic cubist works Hartley also added a passionate, expressionistic use of color, along with a more subtly innovative device; the "German Officer" paintings, while consisting of highly abstract depictions of military medals, regimental banners, and other symbols, have long been accepted as homages to Hartley's friend, Karl von Freyburg, a young German officer who died in battle in 1914. Among Hartley's most innovative works, they were also, in effect, highly abstracted portraits of von Freyburg. "Using symbolic objects to illustrate a subject's psychic and physical characteristics was a radical approach to portraiture," writes Barbara Haskell, "although precedents for it did exist." (Marsden Hartley, p. 45). Among the precedents in literature were the abstract word portraits of Gertrude Stein, with whom Hartley had become closely acquainted in Paris in 1912-1913..
Upon the artist's return to New York, at the same time he completed A Nice Time, Hartley painted a symbolic portrait entitled One Portrait of One Woman (Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis). It depicts in an abstract style a cup and checked tablecloth similar to the objects in the present work, and likewise enigmatically includes a French word, "Moi." Its title, which clearly indicates that Hartley intended the picture to be more than a still life, also hints at its real meaning as a symbolic portrait of Hartley's friend and patron, Gertrude Stein. As noted by Gail Scott, "One Portrait of One Woman is his version of Gertrude Stein, in response to her abstract portrayal of him in a curious play titled I I I I I I I I I I I. Rendered in brilliant red, white, and blue (the colors of both the French and American flags, from the two countries Stein loved), the painting is a symbolic evocation. Using a centrally located word, moi, and a teacup (Hartley often had tea at the Stein's) against a hierarchy of arches, it conveys Stein's impressive personality in both abstract and concrete terms. The title, reflecting that of Stein's play, shows Hartley's playful appreciation of her literary style, manifest especially in the word portraits, where constant repetition of one as a substitute for I intensifies the tension between objectivity and intimacy." (Marsden Hartley, New York, 1988, p. 39).
Given the strong stylistic similarities between One Portrait of One Woman, it is logical, as Bruce Robertson suggests, to conclude that A Nice Time is likewise a portrait, with its actual subject elusive and presently unknown. With a third work painted at the same time, Handsome Drinks (Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York), One Portrait and One Woman and A Nice Time, Robertson continues, form a kind of "trilogy, amounting to most of his first production back in America." (Bruce Robertson, letter, n.d.). All three were exhibited by Hartley in the landmark Forum exhibition of 1916 which included nine works by Hartley. Along with the "German Officer" paintings also shown in the exhibit, these three paintings represent a culminating moment in Hartley's art. With their highly personal and expressive imagery combining portraiture and still life into an entirely new idiom, Hartley created in these works some of his most powerful and advanced modernist paintings.
Painted with brilliant, saturated color, A Nice Time depicts a table-top still-life that includes a prominently placed blue cup and saucer, along with other more ambiguously rendered elements, such as a banana, a tomato, a folded napkin, and a flowering camellia. Enlivened by checker-board patterning, stripes, and flat planes of color, the composition also includes the words: "BON JOUR," "HAH," and the apparently nonsensical: "MLEAGNA." As with many of Hartley's cubist works, his symbolism here remains personal, mysterious and partly impenetrable.
Clearly the painting owes much to Hartley's earlier work, as well as other art of his time, especially the synthetic cubist works of Pablo Picasso. In formal terms, A Nice Time shares similarities with Hartley's earlier, "German Officer" paintings, which are also characterized by the same "flat areas of intense color, contained within discrete boundaries and laid against solid tonal fields." (Barbara Haskell, Marsden Hartley, New York, 1980, p. 42) According to Barbara Haskell, with the German Officer series, "Hartley became the first American artist to wholeheartedly and consistently adopt the vocabulary of synthetic cubism, a style which differed from analytic cubism is its reliance on combinations of flat, colored geometric shapes, rather than on the prismatic fragmentation of three dimensional forms." (Marsden Hartley, p. 44).
To his synthetic cubist works Hartley also added a passionate, expressionistic use of color, along with a more subtly innovative device; the "German Officer" paintings, while consisting of highly abstract depictions of military medals, regimental banners, and other symbols, have long been accepted as homages to Hartley's friend, Karl von Freyburg, a young German officer who died in battle in 1914. Among Hartley's most innovative works, they were also, in effect, highly abstracted portraits of von Freyburg. "Using symbolic objects to illustrate a subject's psychic and physical characteristics was a radical approach to portraiture," writes Barbara Haskell, "although precedents for it did exist." (Marsden Hartley, p. 45). Among the precedents in literature were the abstract word portraits of Gertrude Stein, with whom Hartley had become closely acquainted in Paris in 1912-1913..
Upon the artist's return to New York, at the same time he completed A Nice Time, Hartley painted a symbolic portrait entitled One Portrait of One Woman (Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis). It depicts in an abstract style a cup and checked tablecloth similar to the objects in the present work, and likewise enigmatically includes a French word, "Moi." Its title, which clearly indicates that Hartley intended the picture to be more than a still life, also hints at its real meaning as a symbolic portrait of Hartley's friend and patron, Gertrude Stein. As noted by Gail Scott, "One Portrait of One Woman is his version of Gertrude Stein, in response to her abstract portrayal of him in a curious play titled I I I I I I I I I I I. Rendered in brilliant red, white, and blue (the colors of both the French and American flags, from the two countries Stein loved), the painting is a symbolic evocation. Using a centrally located word, moi, and a teacup (Hartley often had tea at the Stein's) against a hierarchy of arches, it conveys Stein's impressive personality in both abstract and concrete terms. The title, reflecting that of Stein's play, shows Hartley's playful appreciation of her literary style, manifest especially in the word portraits, where constant repetition of one as a substitute for I intensifies the tension between objectivity and intimacy." (Marsden Hartley, New York, 1988, p. 39).
Given the strong stylistic similarities between One Portrait of One Woman, it is logical, as Bruce Robertson suggests, to conclude that A Nice Time is likewise a portrait, with its actual subject elusive and presently unknown. With a third work painted at the same time, Handsome Drinks (Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, New York), One Portrait and One Woman and A Nice Time, Robertson continues, form a kind of "trilogy, amounting to most of his first production back in America." (Bruce Robertson, letter, n.d.). All three were exhibited by Hartley in the landmark Forum exhibition of 1916 which included nine works by Hartley. Along with the "German Officer" paintings also shown in the exhibit, these three paintings represent a culminating moment in Hartley's art. With their highly personal and expressive imagery combining portraiture and still life into an entirely new idiom, Hartley created in these works some of his most powerful and advanced modernist paintings.