Marsden Hartley: Living

“Every painter must traverse for himself that distance from Paris to Aix (Aix-en-Provence where Paul Cézanne frequently painted in open air] or from Venice to Toledo [where w:El Greco lived and painted for many years]. Expression is for one knowing its own pivot. Every expressor relates solely to himself – that is the concern of the individualist.”

Marsden Hartley

statement for catalogue of 'Forum exhibition 1916', reprinted in On art, p. 66-67; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 57
1908 - 1920

Painting

“I see the possibility of being 'made new' again and the gift of rebirth is all that lets anyone really live.... The great secret.... is never to get stuck, imprisoned in common social patterns. They always paralyse the real quality of life – the 'going onward' is all that matters, and the dead moments in one’s life through trying to be a unit in any society or social concept are terrifying really.”

Marsden Hartley

letter to Adelaide Kuntz, September 7, 1933; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 168
1931 - 1943

Life , Secret , Dead

“The same feeling [when Hartley saw a work of the American painter w:Albert Pinkham Ryder for the very first time in his life] came over me in the given degree as came out of the Emerson’s Essays when they were first given to me I I felt as I have read a page of the Bible in both cases. All my essential Yankee qualities we re brought forth out of this picture and if I needed to be stamped an American this was the first picture that had done this – for it had in it everything that I knew and had experienced about my own New England – even though I had never lived by the sea – it had in it the stupendous solemnity of a Blake, [English religious painter] picture and it had a sense of realism besides that bore such a force of nature itself as to leave me breathless.”

Marsden Hartley

Quote in Somehow a Past, 1933-c, 1939, unpublished manuscript, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as cited in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 26
1931 - 1943

Life , Feeling , Nature , Sense

“I have always said that you do not see a thing until you look away from it. In other words, an object or a fact in nature has not become itself until it has been projected in the realm of the imagination. Therefore what has been retained in the mind’s eye is what lives. I have seldom or never worked from nature for this reason and so what I see is what I believe to be true, and that becomes the truism of the creative artist.”

Marsden Hartley

Is Art necessary?, unpublished essay, 1942, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 151
1931 - 1943

Imagination , Nature

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

Marsden Hartley

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

Life , Passion

“The essential of a real picture is that the things which occur in it occur to him in his peculiarly personal fashion.... the idea of modernity is but a new attachment of things universal – a fresh relationship to the courses of the sun and to the living swing of the earth – a new fire of affection for the living essence present everywhere.”

Marsden Hartley

statement for catalogue of 1914 exhibition at 291, reprinted in On art, p. 62; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 49
1908 - 1920

Idea , Fashion , Universe , Sun

“the place [Dogtown, in Gloucester, Massachusetts] is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last formed one spot where she can live for herself alone.... [it] looked like a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge – essentially druidic in it appearance, it gives the feeling that an ancient race might turn up at any moment and renew an ageless rite there.”

Marsden Hartley

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. 90
1931 - 1943

Love , Feeling , Nature , Appearance