Marsden Hartley: News

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

Marsden Hartley

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

“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

“Cubism taught me much and the principle of Pissarro, furthered by Seurat, taught me more. These with Cezanne are the great logicians of color.
No one will ever paint like Cezanne for example, because no one will ever have his peculiar visual gifts; or to put it less dogmatically, will anyone ever appear again with so peculiar and almost unbelievable a faculty for dividing color sensations and making logical realizations of them? Has anyone ever placed his color more reasonably with more of a sense of time and measure than he? I think not, and he furnished for the enthusiast of today new reasons for research into the realm of color for itself.”

Marsden Hartley

n.p.
1921 - 1930, Art and the Personal Life', Marsden Hartley, 1928

Color , Thinking , Sense , Appearance

“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

“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

“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.”

Marsden Hartley

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

Way , Time , Personality

“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.”

Marsden Hartley

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

Freedom , Time