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Marsden Hartley 1878 - 1943
Description
- Marsden Hartley
- Still Life with Flowers
- oil on masonite
- 28 by 22 in.
- (71.1 by 55.9 cm)
- Painted in 1941.
Provenance
Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York
Doris Bry, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above
Exhibited
Literature
Catalogue Note
In 1937, after a lifetime of wandering, Marsden Hartley returned to Maine. Hartley's repatriation to his native state marks the beginning of the final phase of his career, when at last he enjoyed a high degree of recognition and respect, winning prizes, and, not least of all, realizing a decent living after years of desperate financial struggle. Still Life with Flowers is a work from this period.
The trajectory of Hartley's career was by no means marked by a smooth upward motion. His art and his emotional life proceeded in fits and starts. When Hartley entertained the notion of going home at the time of his last show at An American Place, Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, the future looked bleak. Nothing had sold and Hartley was without representation. Then a young dealer, Hudson Walker, agreed to show Hartley's work and the Whitney Museum of Art bought one of the artists' Gloucester, Massachusetts pictures, The Old Bars, Dogtown for $800. (Hudson, a grandson of the founder of the Walker Art Gallery in Minneapolis, maintained an art gallery in New York from 1937 to 1940.) Still, although he would spend nine months a year in Maine for the rest of his life, Hartley did not live long enough to build or own his own home or studio. From 1937 to 1940 he spent his time in Maine nomad-fashion in a variety of locations. In 1940 he boarded with Forest and Katie Young in Corea, a small fishing village on the Gouldsboro peninsula, on Maine's Atlantic coast just north of Acadia National Park. Forest Young was a lobster fisherman, and Hartley made the Young's home his own until his death in 1943.
Hartley painted Still Life with Flowers in 1941. He might have painted it in Maine, or in Manhattan, where he stayed at the Hotel Winslow on East 55th Street from March through July. Hartley painted floral still lifes throughout his career. Still Life with Flowers, one of the last of these, offers a fitting coda on the artist's delight in the subject. Swirls of thickly applied paint in primary colors, red, yellow, green and blue, pick out a floral bouquet that crowds into an amphora-shaped green vase. The vessel rests on a horizontal blue surface, the whole set against a dark background. These flowers seem carelessly arrayed. Two blossoms dangle down the front of the vase, trailing their leaves with them. The bouquet appears fuller on the left as if someone had given up trying to fit the additional flowers that would have made the arrangement symmetrical. Echoing the theme of asymmetry, the amphora's two handles are also mismatched, lending a rakish air to what is perhaps the work of an amateur potter. The brilliant colors, the thick impasto, the strong contrast between the flowers and their dark background all contribute to a vision of floral exuberance and indomitable life. Hartley exhibited his picture in a 1942 wartime show of contemporary work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art called On the Bright Side, an aptly titled venue for this canvas. Hartley painted at least one other similar still life in 1941, now in the collection of The Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska. The provenance of Still Life with Flowers is distinguished. It went from the Macbeth Gallery, where Hartley showed drawings in 1941 to Paul Rosenberg & Co., Hartley's final dealer, and then to Doris Bry. Bry was the longtime personal and professional assistant and dealer for Georgia O'Keeffe. She has written and edited numerous books on O'Keeffe and her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.