Marsden Hartley: Quotes about time

“It is the incongruous thing in my entire life, this isolation.... My work requires it – but I myself have no need or use for it – Perhaps once on a time I found isolation imperative – I think all chrysalises do – all embryos go for the underside of the leaf in the time of body-change preparing for the final reassertion –resurrection – the establishment of the entity. But now I’ve come up tot the outside of my casements.”

Marsden Hartley

Quote from Marsden Hartley Revisited or, Were We Really Ever There, Peter Plagens; Artforum 7, May 1969, p. 41
1931 - 1943

Life , Thinking , Change , Time

“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

“I believe until a man has given up himself he has given up nothing - all his knowledge of accepted aesthetics are of no avail until he has stepped aside from them and given up himself – himself only through the eyes of himself. What a problem everlasting then is it not? A life time of breathless endeavor to be the thing and do the thing of his being – So easy to travel along with claques and crowds, voicing vociferously the great discoveries of each – How ineffably difficult, voicing the soul of one man – alone to himself and – then to whomever else hears..”

Marsden Hartley

letter to w:Alfred Sieglitz, June 1911, Hartley Archive, Yale University; as quoted in Marsden Hartley, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press, 1988, New York p. 147
1908 - 1920

Life , Travel , Soul , Knowledge

“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 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.”

Marsden Hartley

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

God , Feeling , 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.”

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