Marsden Hartley 1877 - 1943

Collection of J. Tessier (acquired directly from the artist)
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York
Barbara Tuchman, New York
Gifted from the above, 1977

Flowers in a Vase was painted around 1928 when Hartley returned to Europe from a six month trip to America. First in Paris, and then Aix-en-Province, the home and hallowed painting ground of Paul Cézanne, Hartley concentrated on still lifes. Among these works was a series of views of calla lilies often displayed in a green-tinted cylindrical glass vase.  Hartley had painted calla lilies in 1917. When he returned to the flower in 1928, he experimented. Keeping as fixed variables the subject as well as the viewpoint, a larger then life frontal image, Hartley treated palette and technique as variables, producing a series of related, but clearly differentiated canvases. Flowers in a Vase bears a strong resemblance in palette and technique to a 1925 Hartley landscape, Landscape No. 29, Vence (illustrated in color in Gail R. Scott, Marsden Hartley, 1988, fig. 64, p. 78). Scott could as well be describing Flowers in a Vase when she says of this landscape that Hartley "paints in broad parallel strokes that emulate the facture invented by Cézanne as a way of defining mass by means of color harmonies. Hartley also used the unpainted white of the canvas to aerate the space, a technique he had first adopted from Cézanne in ... 1912-13" (pp. 78-9). William Agee, calling Hartley's Cézanne-inspired work "original" and "marvels of the art of painting," says of them: "They are, to be sure, an act of homage, but the results are startling" (as quoted in Scott, p. 79).  The flowers gathered here on Hartley's canvas lack botanical detail, but express, through Hartley's mastery of color and form, the exuberance of blooms bursting with life.