MARSDEN HARTLEY (1877-1943) Still Life with Lemons (Fruit and Tumbler), 1928 oil on composition board 23 7/8 x 19 5/8 inches signed, dated and inscribed on verso "Marsden Hartley /Conway Mass /1928" Provenance The Artist George Alexander Carden, Sr., Baystore, New York, 1928-1949 (gift of the artist) Dr. George Alexander Carden, Jr., (his son) and Constance Carden, New York, NY and Far Hills, NJ, 1949-1996 Private Collection, 1996-2006 (by descent from the above) Private Collection, New York, NY, 2006-Present Exhibited The Heart of the Matter: The Still Lifes of Marsden Hartley, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York, NY, May 6 - June 27, 2003 (as Fruit and Tumbler) Landmarks of 20th Century American Art, Forum Gallery, New York, NY November 8, 2018 – January 5, 2019 Literature Weber, Bruce. The Heart of the Matter: The Still Lifes of Marsden Hartley, Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., New York, 2003, frontispiece, Illustrated (detail), p. 106, pl. 26, Illustrated, pp: 56-57, Reference, and p. 160, Listed. Brooker, Niccolo. Landmarks of 20th Century American Art, Forum Gallery, New York, NY, 2018, pp. 56-59 and p. 57, Illustrated. Essay In January of 1928 Marsden Hartley returned to New York from France, where he had been since the Summer of 1925. In March, he traveled to Chicago to attend an exhibition of his work at the Arts Club, then on to Colorado to see another show of his work organized by his old friend Arnold Rönnebeck, the director of the Denver Art Museum. Before heading back to France on August 20th, Hartley spent the month of July at the Summer home of William Bullitt and Louise Bryant in Conway, Massachusetts. There, he devoted time to writing poetry, essays on art, and completing a group of paintings, at least one of which, Still Life with Lemons, was a direct consequence of Hartley’s recently initiated work in silverpoint. From about 1927 to 1933 Hartley worked on and off in silverpoint, a process with which he had become familiar via his artist friend John Storrs. Compared to drawing, the medium can be time-consuming and demanding, but also delicate and subtle, as Hartley revealed in his silverpoints from Aix-en-Provenance (1927) and the Bavarian Alps (1933). Standing directly overhead the paper sheet, he incised multiple, same directional diagonals through which he compressed the picture plane and generated ambiguity between verisimilitude and abstraction. Naturalism is challenged from the same above position and via the same flattened pictorial surface in Still Life with Lemons. “The lemons and plate in the foreground are carefully and solidly modeled. In contrast, the drapery, glass, and orange are painted in a flat, schematic, and sketchy style. Compositional unity is achieved through Hartley’s harmonious handling of brilliant colors. The painting exemplifies one of Hartley’s favorite sayings from Cézanne: ‘When the colour harmonizes the design becomes precise.’ ” (Weber, Bruce, The Heart of the Matter: Still Lifes of Marsden Hartley, exhibition catalogue, Berry Hill Galleries, New York, 2003, p. 17) Hartley, The Old Bars, Dogtown, 1936 Hartley, Plums on White Cloth, 1927, silverpoint (coll. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York) (coll. Detroit Art Institute) Hartley became an artist just as the century had turned, beginning with four years of study at the National Academy of Design in 1900. Young and restless, he was drawn to art at the time of his own self-identification as a homosexual. Like Charles Demuth, Hartley channeled his sexuality through painterly expression, but unlike his artist friend was never overt or graphic about the issue and fully ensconced it within symbolism and allegory. The last of his Post-Impressionist paintings, his so-called “stitch” sequence, won him early esteem from Alfred Stieglitz, who gave Hartley his first one-man exhibition in 1909. Along with Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and John Marin, Hartley would enjoy Stiegtliz’s imprimatur for the rest of his life. Before the end of the 1910s he was impressively given another four solo shows at Stiegltiz’s gallery “291”; remarkably, by 1920 Hartley had painted in Paris, Berlin, Munich, New Mexico, Southern California, Maine, and Provincetown (Massachusetts). Hartley’s success hardly waned over three full decades, during which time he experienced major accomplishments in both Europe and the United States. He left an abundant production in different mediums and varying subject matter for posterity. Perhaps it is precisely because of his accolades that finding an overarching narrative for Hartley’s oeuvre is elusive. Or maybe that narrative lies less within the confines of his variable imagery than in the immateriality of Hartley’s lifelong spirituality. While studying as a young man at the Cleveland Institute of Art a professor gave him a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Written in two series in the 1840s, the Essays are the essence of Emerson’s transcendentalism, of his philosophy of the soul and how it may relate to the natural world. At the time thirty years old, Hartley spent several months with the community of mystics at Green Acre in Eliot, Maine, where he lived among theologians and theosophists. A few years later, in Germany in 1913, he met Wassily Kandinsky, whose On the Spiritual in Art he had already read. From this point onwards Hartley’s work harbored symbolic, often cryptic imagery, which quickly manifested itself in his German military War Motifs and Amerika paintings. In his late Dogtown (Cape Ann, Massachusetts) oils, Hartley was still coalescing interpretive and representational imagery, at times distinguishable only to himself. If Emerson was the cornerstone of the American Romantic movement, his devotee Hartley was the post-Romantic mystic, the cosmic cubist aloft the pantheon of American Modernist giants. Marsden Hartley, 1916, photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. (coll. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) .