Marsden Hartley Quotes

Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist.

✵ 4. January 1877 – 2. September 1943
Marsden Hartley photo
Marsden Hartley: 33   quotes 0   likes

Famous Marsden Hartley Quotes

“For wine, they drank the ocean – for bread, they ate their own despairs; counsel from the moon was theirs – for the foolish contention - Murder is not a pretty thing – yet seas do raucous everything to make it pretty – for the foolish or the brave, a way seas have.”

poem on his painting: Fishermen’s Last Supper [of the Mason family, c. 1940-1941]; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 113
1931 - 1943

Marsden Hartley Quotes about life

“These people [the Mason-family in Nova Scotia] have that sort of incandescence, which is peculiar to those who know the meaning of simplicity & humility. They are illumined from within makes them essentially mystical in their sense of life.”

letter to A. Sieglitz, October 28, 1936, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 111
1931 - 1943

“I don’t want to escape via intellectual ruses – I want affirmations via passionate embraces & you can’t have life unless you live it.”

letter to Adelaide Kuntz, November 6, 1935; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 169
1931 - 1943

Marsden Hartley Quotes about time

“They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun; they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression of direct experience.”

Quote from Whitman and Cézanne, in Adventures in the Arts, New York, Boni Liveright 1921; as cited in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 34
1921 - 1930

“My work is getting stronger & stronger and more intense all the time.... I have such a rush of new energy & notions coming into my head, over my horizon like chariots of fire that all I want is freedom to step aside and execute them.”

Hartley to Kuntz, February 2, 1940, as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 147
1931 - 1943

“I have achieved the 'sacred' pilgrimage to Ktaadn MT – exceeding all my expectations so far that I am sort of helpless with words. I feel as if I have seen God for the first time, and find him so nonchalantly solemn.”

Quote in his letter to Adelaide Kuntz, October 24, 1939; as cited in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 130
1931 - 1943

Marsden Hartley Quotes

“.. [Picasso had] a depth of understanding and insight into the inwardness of things.... doing very exceptional things of a most abstract psychic nature..”

letter from Paris to Rockwell Kent, August 22, 1912, Archives of American Art; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 42
1908 - 1920

“Blake would not laugh at my fantasies if he saw them [in contrary to the public in New York, as Hartley realized well, before]”

Hartley to Kuntz, April 4, 1932; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 99
in this quote Hartly is referring to his mythical paintings like 'Tollan, Aztec Legend' (1933)
1931 - 1943

“They want Americans to be American, and yet they offer little or no spiritual sustenance for their growth and welfare [quote on the critics who push to stop his long European stay and to return]”

letter to Adelaide Kuntz, June 23, 1928, Archives of American Art; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 81
1921 - 1930

“My work embodies little visions of the great intangible.... Some will say he’s gone mad – others will look and say he’s looked in at the lattices of Heaven and come back with the madness of splendor on him.”

letter to Seumus O'Sheel, October 10, 1908, Hartley Archive, Archives of American Art; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 25
1908 - 1920

“My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape.”

letter to w:Alfred Stieglitz, October 9, 1919, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 68
1908 - 1920

“I am not a 'book of the month' artist, and I do not paint pretty pictures; but when I am no longer here my name will register forever in the history of American art.”

In a letter to his sister at the end of his life; as quoted in 'The return of the Native' by Joseph Phelan, Artcyclopedia online
1931 - 1943

“.. by getting as close to the true idea of religion, of spirituality as it is possible for us to get.... we would be in possession of the only tangible relationship tot the deity in things.”

letter from Paris to Rockwell Kent, August 22, 1912, Archives of American Art; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 44
1908 - 1920

“I could never be French, I could never become German – I shall always remain American – the essence which is in me is American mysticism just as Davies declared it when he saw those first landscapes.”

letter to Alfred Stieglitz, February 8, 1913; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 44
1908 - 1920

“.. the virtue of Yankee upbringing spiritually speaking is of more downright value to me than any past heritages.”

Somehow a Past, 1933-c, 1939; unpublished manuscript, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 11
1931 - 1943

“It is never difficult to see images – when the principle of the image is embedded in the soul.”

Hartley to Kuntz, April 4, 1932; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 124
1931 - 1943

“[I was] happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method.... rendering the God-spirit in the mountains.”

letter to Horace Traubel around 1908; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 18
1908 - 1920

“They [The Mason family where Hartley stayed 1935 - 1941] maintain an enviable balance between the material & spiritual worlds (so) they symbolize for me the term ideal.”

Quote of Hartley in his letter to Adelaide Kuntz, September 9, 1936; as cited in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 124-125
1931 - 1943

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