Marsden Hartley 1877 - 1943

Oscar Thorsen, Lindsborg, Kansas, 1919 (acquired directly from the artist)
Gifted to the present owner from the above, 1968

We are grateful to Gail R. Scott for preparing the following essay. Ms. Scott, a leading Hartley scholar, is the author of the monograph Marsden Hartley (New York, 1998) and the editor of collections of his poetry and essays on art.  

This stunningly beautiful still life from 1919—depicting a blooming cactus in a Pueblo Indian blackware olla, set on a red and white striped table cloth with a view of the New Mexico landscape seen through a window—could well be Marsden Hartley's visual counterpart to an essay he wrote the year before, "America as Landscape." The article, published in the December, 1918 issue of El Palacio,[1] the magazine for the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe, is essentially Hartley's post-war, post-Europe manifesto of his newly rediscovered American-ness. Speaking from experience (albeit somewhat obliquely), he explains in the article that the war has ". . . sent the painters and the poets home, and they have been obliged to observe native excellence and indications."

From 1912 to 1915 Hartley had wholeheartedly embraced Europe—first Paris and then, beginning in late 1913, Germany, soaking up all the emerging modernist ideas and modes of art from Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse to his alliance with Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and the German movements of the Blaue Reiter, Die Brucke, and proto-German Expressionists of pre-war Berlin. Just when Hartley had successfully launched his own, highly original contribution as an American modernist with his groundbreaking German Officer paintings in 1914-15, the pressures of being an American in Berlin in the midst of war forced his return to America.

That return, made more wrenching because of the less-than-enthusiastic reception of these paintings that seemed to an American audience to glorify the German military, caused Hartley to drift about New England for a time. Finally, in 1918, accepting the hospitality of Mabel Dodge Luhan, he headed west, to Taos and Santa Fe, hoping to recharge his energies and reconnect with his native country. If not for the exigencies of war, Hartley might have stayed indefinitely in Europe, despite his deep roots in New England. Difficult for Hartley to accept at the time but how fortunate for us that at this critical juncture in his career he was willing and able to rethink and re-envision just what America could mean to him as well as to the future course of art in America.

Having been thus "sent home," the painters and poets (and Hartley was both since he was an active and published poet and essayist) were being forced to "observe native excellence" in lieu of what he cleverly phrased, "the fetish of Paris" by which he meant painting that relied so heavily on theory as to be attenuated into "paper painting" (or, as he also described it, "badly digested impressionism"). His solution, proclaimed in the title of his article, was America as landscape, a "sturdier kind of realism that approximates the "solidity of [the] landscape itself." In the painted deserts, dramatic mountains, arroyos, and endless skies of New Mexico, Hartley discovered the solid landscape of America, made all the more authentic by the presence of its ancient people of the Rio Grande watershed and their surviving culture. Taking his cue from these original inhabitants (whom Hartley called in the unthinking vernacular of the era, "Red Men"), Hartley called on artists to have the "courage . . . to sit patiently and observe, to get a connection with their own native land."

Still Life is Hartley's answer to his own clarion call. In its dominant hues—the red and white stripes of the table cloth, red cactus flowers, and ruddy sandstone of the desert, the blue mountains with their mantle of cerulean sky and huge white clouds—this painting evokes and celebrates America. The central object of the still life—the black, slightly irregular earthen ware pot—is a gesture of respect for the Pueblo people of the region—a respect articulated not only in "America as Landscape," but also in similar essays Hartley wrote both in and after leaving New Mexico.[2] Moreover, tactilely, Still Life approximates the earth it depicts; the paint texture resembles the baked clay and sandstone of the desert. Adapted, no doubt, from the medium of pastel that occupied him when he first arrived in the region, Hartley used a dry, scumbling technique that blurs edges and softens shapes in his New Mexico oil paintings, including Still Life and El Santo (Fig. 1). The originality of Hartley's color and handling of paint prompted photographer Paul Strand to write to Alfred Stieglitz when he saw El Santo years later: ". . .  amazing color and that dry paint quality which he alone has which creates a new fine tactility – paint and not yet paint," to which he added, "Hartley is a giant."[3]

Still life paintings figured prominently throughout Hartley's career and represent some of his most fulsome, joyful, and unencumbered works.[4]  Depending on his location or mood or the objects at hand (shells, flowers, a dead bird, star fish, a piece of rope) or people in this thoughts, Hartley's still lifes could be straightforward studies of objects on a table (flowers in a vase); an escape from the landscape in his immediate environs that he found too boring to paint (certainly not the case with this New Mexico still life); a discipline to re-constitute himself as a painter; a remembrance or memorial; or even pure invention. New Mexico, with its mixture of Spanish, Mexican and native cultures and religious traditions, inspired Hartley to meld these influences into paintings like Still Life and El Santo, which depicts a retablo[5] (a Mexican votive image of Christ carrying the cross), hung slightly askew on a wall behind a table with a striped Indian blanket and a black olla pot (similar to the one in Still Life) containing a spiky aloe.

In Hartley's oeuvre, the window still life (objects on a windowsill or table with a view to a landscape or seascape in the distance) is a fairly common subset of the genre. Over the course of his life he painted upwards of forty window still lifes, beginning in 1916-1917 with Atlantic Window in the New England Character and ending with a number of radiant and simplified yet monumental works executed during the last two years of his life, such as Sea Window – Tinker Mackerel, 1942 (Fig. 2).

In Still Life the distant mountains, desert floor and cliffs are bathed in light because, as Hartley wrote in "Esthetic Sincerity," another essay published in El Palacio, "It is not a country of light on things. It is a country of things in light."[6] One effect of such a sun-drenched landscape was, as Hartley told Stieglitz in a letter, that "spaces [are] so huge and so simple and details are so clear that nothing seems far off and distance is like a fiction for the eye."[7] The window functions less as a window and more as a picture frame; our view is not so much through it to a distant vista, but rather of an arrangement of forms in a shallow space. The foreground cactus leaves and red flowers appear more at one with the pink desert floor than separated by space. The mountains and clouds, echoing each other in peaks and arcs, are equally sculptural—the "solidity" of the landscape the artist found so stirring in the Southwest.

Still Life has an intriguing provenance and a story worth telling. In her 1984 study, Modernist Painting in New Mexico 1913-1935,[8] Sharon Udall cites a review in the Santa Fe New Mexican that describes a still life arrangement of a red blossoming cactus at an open window with a view of a southwestern landscape—a work not known to Udall and which she assumed was lost but turns out to be our Still Life. Lost it was not; rather it was purchased directly from the artist by a visitor to Santa Fe, Johan Oscar Thorsen and promptly whisked back to his home in Lindsborg, Kansas, a small town settled in by Swedish immigrants like himself. Thorsen had traveled west with his colleague from Bethany College in Lindsborg, Birger Sandzén (1871–1954), an artist who had studied in Stockholm with Anders Zorn and later in Paris with Edmond-François Aman-Jean, from whom he adopted a pointillist style of painting. Thereafter, along with paintings by Henry Varnum Poor, Birger Sandzén, and other modern painters, Still Life hung prominently in Thorsen's modest apartment in Lindsborg (Fig. 3) until his death in 1968 when he bequeathed his collection to the Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery at Bethany College.

In terms of sales, 1919 was a banner year for Hartley. In January he had been invited to exhibit El Santo and a group of his New Mexico pastels in Santa Fe's Museum of New Mexico, and an anonymous patron purchased El Santo and donated it to the museum. That sale provided some needed cash for Hartley to make a trip to California to visit his friend, Carl Sprinchorn. In August, after his return from California, several of his paintings were again on view in Santa Fe. Sandzén and Thorsen, who were interested in the work of various modernists living and working in New Mexico, met Hartley, B.J.O. Nordfeldt, Varnum Poor, Leon Kroll, and others. Thorsen purchased Hartley's Still Life and a painting by Varnum Poor. Rarely did Hartley sell a painting so easily to an individual buyer.

Hartley's work was not, however, well understood or acclaimed by Santa Feans. Still Life, in particular, was singled out with alarm in a review which warned, "The art lover who wants to get a shock similar to that experienced in getting hold of a wire charged with electricity should stroll in the Queres Gallery of the New Museum and study the paintings and sketches by Marsden Hartley."[9] Clearly, Mr. Thorsen was far from being shocked and considerably more discerning and progressive in his knowledge and taste in art than the local critic. Probably under the tutelage of Birger Sandzén, whose own concerns in landscape painting focused on color arrangements and light, Thorsen must have responded to the luminosity and vibrant palette in Hartley's Still Life. Sandzén, himself, was duly impressed by Hartley's work, commenting in a letter to one of his students that "he is one of our best American moderns" as well as "a splendid critic and writer."[10] Shortly after returning to Lindsborg, he organized an exhibition of work by artists he had seen in his travels to the Southwest, including two of Hartley's New Mexico paintings (not Thorsen's Still Life). The show opened in Lindsborg in October, 1919 and then parts of it (including the two Hartleys) traveled to Hiawatha, Kansas, the University of Oklahoma, Norman, and El Paso, Texas.

With Still Life—as with El Santo, Sea Window – Tinker Mackerel, and other masterpieces by Hartley—our initial engagement with the work is, of course, via the particular subject (a pot of flowers with a landscape behind or fish on a table with a seascape view, etc.). Quickly, however, as our eye roves beyond the things portrayed, we are inexorably drawn to more subtle and ambiguous areas of the canvas, such as the slightly amorphous vertical elements on either side of the window in Still Life. This is no ordinary window, however; it has no symmetry as a framing device. The left side contains two parts: a green strip with, paler green, horizontal stripes, and a thinner one next to the window with black and pink-white bands. The border to the right of the window is completely amorphous and does not "match" anything on the left. Twenty-three years later, in the 1942 painting Sea Window – Tinker Mackerel, we see Hartley using a similar framing device. The vertical bands on right and left are more symmetrical but still non-referential in form. Though not crucial to our understanding of the subject, these mysterious passages of abstraction in the window frames are nevertheless intriguing and draw us deeper into an experience of the painting as painting. In El Santo, the wall behind the devotional retablo functions similarly; it has no naturalistic shadow or light source but is instead an irregular pattern of pure, painterly brushstrokes, ranging in hue from blue-black to shades of purple and turquoise.

After first absorbing the rich and varied still life motifs and landscape views of Still Life and similar "window view" paintings by Hartley, what we discover at a more oblique but nevertheless revelatory level are the sheer muscularity of Hartley's handling of paint and the extraordinary range of his palette—from deep and somber darks to luminous whites. And what we really see in this canvas (which is dressed up as a still life with a view through a window) is Hartley at his most sublime: pure painting—vigorous yet subtle, simultaneously ordinary and sublime.

[1] Marsden Hartley, "America as Landscape," El Palacio, v (December 21, 1918): 340-342.
[2] Marsden Hartley, "Red Man Ceremonials," Art and Archeology, 9 (January 1920): 7-14, reprinted in Adventures in the Arts. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921, pp. 13-29. And, "The Scientific Esthetic of the Redman, Art and Archeology 13 (March 1922): 113-119 and 14 (September 1922): 137-139.
[3] Letter from Paul Strand to Alfred Stieglitz, September 20, 1926, Stieglitz Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University (hereafter YCAL).
[4] For a comprehensive study of Hartley's still life works, see Bruce Weber, The Heart of the Matter: The Still Lifes of Marsden Hartley (Berry-Hill Galleries, 2003).
[5] Hartley's hostess in New Mexico, Mabel Dodge and her husband at the time, Maurice Sterne, had a large collection of these carved and painted Mexican retablos and bultos.
[6] Marsden Hartley, "Esthetic Sincerity," El Palacio, 5 (December 9, 1918): 332-333.
[7] Letter from Hartley to Stieglitz, June 24, 1918, YCAL.
[8] Cited in Sharon Rohlfsen Udall, Modernist Painting in New Mexico 1913-1935. Albuquerque, New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 1984, p. 40 and footnote 29.
[9] Ibid., 43 and footnote 34.
[10] Letter from Birger Sandzén to Oscar Jacobson, November 30, 1919, Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery Archives, Bethany College, Lindsborg, Kansas. I am grateful to Ron Michael, curator, for searching out and sharing with me relevant letters and documents regarding Hartley's relationship to Oscar Thorsen and Birger Sandzén.