Hartley's indicative objects: a recent exhibition spotlighted the still lifes of Marsden Hartley, finding in them a metaphorical complexity and emotional range to rival that of his better known landscapes and abstractions

Art in America, Nov, 2003 by Robert Berlind

We know him best for the groundbreaking abstractions done in Berlin in 1914 and '15, and the flinty Maine and Nova Scotia landscapes, as well as the figure paintings done near the end of his career. Because of this prodigious outpouring of images of New Mexico, Bavaria, Provence, New England and the Maritimes, he is considered a painter of the outdoors with fervent affinities for the spirit of those places. However, Marsden Hartley was essentially a studio artist. He made drawings on site but did not, as a rule, paint outside, working instead from studies and recollected feelings, often in a different location altogether. (The "New Mexico Recollection" paintings done in Berlin are striking examples.) His references to the observed world were less descriptive, less based on immediate visual experience than they were expository and expressive. Although there were some 18 still lifes in the Wadsworth Atheneum's recent Hartley retrospective, the overall impression was that this genre was not of primary importance to him. (1) The ambitious exhibition at New York's Berry-Hill Galleries titled "The Heart of the Matter: The Still Lifes of Marsden Hartley," with no fewer than 60 works, revealed the centrality of still life to his development.

Hartley frequently painted still lifes as a way of getting started in new locations while he familiarized himself with the place and sought out landscape motifs. The practice also provided a way of working when a particular environment offered no views of interest, as in Vence, Bermuda and Georgetown, Maine. Lacking a strong feeling of rapport with a locale, Hartley simply had nothing to paint: "Loving a place," he wrote, "has the same quality as loving a person--you either care deeply for it or you find casual interest in it or no interest at all." (2) He might have said the same with regard to all of his subject matter. His approach to still life was distinctive in that this was the only genre in which he painted directly from his model; but, like Max Beckmann, whose style of describing objects, with its black drawing and rough manner, is often similar, Hartley was incapable of a dispassionate, empirical approach.

After the early still lifes of 1910 through 1912, in which we see Hartley absorbing lessons from Matisse's Fauvist explorations of Cezanne's structure, every thing is absorbed into a personal vision, charged with emotional inferences. Following the abstractions of his flint Berlin period, a series of relatively austere still lifes done in Provincetown announces his return to representation. Some, such as Compote with Fruit (1916) and One Portrait of One Woman (ca. 1916), a symbolic portrait of Gertrude Stein seen in the Wadsworth Atheneum retrospective, preserve the off-symmetry of his earlier abstractions. Others (not seen at Berry-Hill) include Dadaist wordplay and some, the "Movement" paintings, remain abstract. In all, the paint handling is restrained, elegant and matter-of fact, featuring grayed colors applied in a single layer with little or no modeling.

Still life was for Hartley a testing ground for shifts of style and attitude. In 1920, restlessly oscillating between expressive and analytical modes, he painted Leathery Leaves in a manner that set faceted planes of terracotta and cool green against deep blacks, browns and blues that are more suggestive of chiaroscuro than of Cubist geometry. The years 1925 and '26 found him in Vence and Aix-en-Provence, painting still lilts that celebrate simple rural repasts in a quasi-naive manner. The breads, walnuts and figs, done with a preponderance of warm earth tones, along with a centrally placed bottle of wine, a glass and a lively vine in Peasant's Paradise (1925-26) show his deep affection for traditional agrarian life, similar to his love of the coastal working life of Nova Scotia and Maine. Correspondingly, Hartley admired and appropriated various folk-art traditions for their modesty, formal naivete, and, often, their devotional spirit. In the hallucinatory Night among the Flowers (Night--and Some Flowers), 1935-36, he adopts the overall stipple effect of certain Mexican folk paintings.

The Berry-Hill exhibition confirmed Hartley as an extraordinary colorist. Anemones (1929) is an astonishing arrangement of white, red and purple flowers against all orangey-red ground above a draped cloth of warm alizarin. Stems and leaves of green set off the dreamy chromatic harmony. Hartley favored a range of reds throughout his work, and many of the still-life arrangements are set against a ground of dark sienna or Indian red verging on black. Working often on Masonite or other board, and occasionally even on cardboard when he lacked funds, he would lay down a warm, dark tone, sometimes simply a coat of shellac, on which to paint. The Impressionist legacy of the primed, white canvas, which so many painters since have taken for granted, is nowhere evident in his work. Methodical studies in a sketchbook show the results of stumbling various colors over a dark red composed of cadmium red and umber. (3)