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拍品专文
When visiting Gloucester, Massachusetts in the early 1920s, Marsden Hartley became enthralled with the nearby area of Dogtown Common. Disinterested in the popular Gloucester harbor scenes commonly depicted by his predecessors and contemporaries, Dogtown fulfilled the artist's want of solitude and moved him with its unique, primitive landscape, composed of large granite boulders that seemingly stood still in time. After spending several years abroad, Hartley returned home to his native New England and made the first of his return trips to Dogtown in 1931. Works such as Cynical Blue, Jovial Brown, Dogtown underscore the impact that this virtually uninhabited locale had on Hartley's artistic inspiration and it was this unique setting that allowed the artist to revel in his unspoiled surroundings.
Hartley described Dogtown as "a place so original in its appearance as not to be duplicated either in New England or anywhere else--the rocks all heaped up there from the glacial period, and the air of being made for no one, for nothing but itself...A sense of eeriness pervades all the place therefore and the white shirts of those huge boulders, mostly granite, stand like sentinels guarding nothing but shore--sea gulls fly over it on their way to the marshes to the sea--otherwise the place is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last found one spot where she can live for herself alone. It takes someone to be obsessed by nature for its own sake--one with a feeling for austerities and the intellectual aloofness which lost lonesome areas can persist in." (as quoted in Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 144)
In Cynical Blue, Jovial Brown, Dogtown, Hartley responds to his natural surroundings by portraying a primordial terrain composed of unforgiving forms. He depicts the boulders, trees and ground with expressive brushwork, revealing the sculptural and tactile surfaces of the rugged environment. These bold strokes of pigment complement the underlying structure and order of space that defines the scene. Hartley would often spend hours sketching among the rocks and would then return to his studio to complete the fully realized oil compositions, with the overwhelming presence of nature still hauntingly fresh in his mind.
In a letter to a friend in the Fall of 1931, Hartley expressed his captivation with the landscape of Dogtown and the subsequent effect it had on his work; "It cannot appeal to dull painters because it calls for deep contact and study and I am capable of both, and while my pictures are small-they are more intense than ever before, and I have for once (again) immersed myself in the mysticism of nature." (as quoted in E.M. Kornhauser, ed., Marsden Hartley, New Haven, Connecticut, 2002, p. 308) Hartley would return to Dogtown again in 1934 and 1936. It was this visit in 1931, however, that provided the artist with an intellectual awakening that would have a profound effect on his future canvases and resulted in the most striking landscapes from this period, such as Cynical Blue, Jovial Brown, Dogtown.
Hartley described Dogtown as "a place so original in its appearance as not to be duplicated either in New England or anywhere else--the rocks all heaped up there from the glacial period, and the air of being made for no one, for nothing but itself...A sense of eeriness pervades all the place therefore and the white shirts of those huge boulders, mostly granite, stand like sentinels guarding nothing but shore--sea gulls fly over it on their way to the marshes to the sea--otherwise the place is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last found one spot where she can live for herself alone. It takes someone to be obsessed by nature for its own sake--one with a feeling for austerities and the intellectual aloofness which lost lonesome areas can persist in." (as quoted in Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 144)
In Cynical Blue, Jovial Brown, Dogtown, Hartley responds to his natural surroundings by portraying a primordial terrain composed of unforgiving forms. He depicts the boulders, trees and ground with expressive brushwork, revealing the sculptural and tactile surfaces of the rugged environment. These bold strokes of pigment complement the underlying structure and order of space that defines the scene. Hartley would often spend hours sketching among the rocks and would then return to his studio to complete the fully realized oil compositions, with the overwhelming presence of nature still hauntingly fresh in his mind.
In a letter to a friend in the Fall of 1931, Hartley expressed his captivation with the landscape of Dogtown and the subsequent effect it had on his work; "It cannot appeal to dull painters because it calls for deep contact and study and I am capable of both, and while my pictures are small-they are more intense than ever before, and I have for once (again) immersed myself in the mysticism of nature." (as quoted in E.M. Kornhauser, ed., Marsden Hartley, New Haven, Connecticut, 2002, p. 308) Hartley would return to Dogtown again in 1934 and 1936. It was this visit in 1931, however, that provided the artist with an intellectual awakening that would have a profound effect on his future canvases and resulted in the most striking landscapes from this period, such as Cynical Blue, Jovial Brown, Dogtown.