MARSDEN HARTLEY: artist quotes by the painter on his paintings, art, poems, spirituality & life in American Modernism; + short biography facts
MARSDEN HARTLEY (1877 – 1943) was a famous visual artist in American Modernism. Hartley – a hard working and curious painter who travelled a lot through Europe to learn European avantgarde; he became closely connected with the artists and the art of Cézanne and the Blue Rider artists (Kandinsky and Franz Marc). Many of his quotes here are taken from his letters and essays. At the bottom more biography facts and some useful art links for Marsden Hartley. (ed: Fons Heijnsbroek)
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Hartley: ‘Landscape New Mexico’ – painting, 1923 |
MARSDEN HARTLEY, 26 artist quotes on his paintings and life creating art in American Modernism
- 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, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: letter to photographer and art dealer Alfred Sieglitz (who was married with Georgia O’Keeffe , 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 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- What I have to express is not handled with words. It must ‘come’ to the observer. It must carry its influence over the mind of the individual into that region of him which is more than the mind. The pictures must reach inwards into the deeper experiences of the beholder – and mind you they care in no sense religious tracts – there is no story to them or literature – no morals – they are merely artistic expressions of mystical states – these in themselves being my own personal motives as drawn from either special experiences or aggregate ones.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: letter to 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. 9 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- … the virtue of Yankee upbringing spiritually speaking is of more downright value to me than any past heritages.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: ‘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 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- (I was, fh) happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method… … rendering the God-spirit in the mountains.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: letter to Horace Traubel, circa 1908; as quoted in ”Marsden Hartley”, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press 1988, New York p. 18 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- 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.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: a 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 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- The same feeling (Marsden saw a painting of the American famous painter A. Ryder for the first time in his life, fh)) 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 were 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 (famous English spiritual painter William Blake, fh) picture and it had a sense of realism besides that bore such a force of nature itself as to leave me breathless.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: ‘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. 26 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- 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 chrysalides 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 to the outside of my casements.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: ‘Marsden Hartley Revisited or, Were We Really Ever There’, by Peter Plagens, Artforum no.7, May 1969, p. 41 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- 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, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: ‘Whitman and Cézanne’, in “Adventures in the Arts”, New York, Boni Liveright 1921; as quoted in ”Marsden Hartley”, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press 1988, New York p. 34 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- 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.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: letter to A. Stieglitz (husband of the famous woman painter Georgia O’Keeffe, fh) , February 8, 1913; as quoted in ”Marsden Hartley”, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press 1988, New York p. 44 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- ..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.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: letter 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 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- 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, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: statement for the catalogue of 1914, exhibition at ‘291’, reprinted in ”On art”, p. 62 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- Every painter must traverse for himself that distance from Paris to Aix (the location where Cézanne frequently painted landscapes, fh) or from Venice to Toledo (where El Greco painted and lived many years, fh). Expression is for one knowing its own pivot. Every expressor relates solely to himself – that is the concern of the individualist.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: statement for catalogue of ‘Forum’ exhibition 1916, reprinted in ”On art”, p. 66-67 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- 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.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: letter to 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 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- They want Americans to be American, and yet they offer little or no spiritual sustenance for their growth and welfare (reaction on the critic that Hartley as an American artist stayed too long in Europe where he stayed and worked for several years, fh) .
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: 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 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- ..the place (Dogtown, Gloucester, Massachusetts, fh) 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, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: ‘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 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- These people 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 (on the Mason-family in Nova Scotia, where Hartley stayed during 1935 – 1938; he portrayed the family several times, fh) .
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & 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 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- 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.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: some lines from a poem he wrote on his painting: ‘Fishermen’s Last Supper’ (the Mason family 1940-1941); as quoted in ”Marsden Hartley”, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press 1988, New York p. 113 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- It is never difficult to see images – when the principle of the image is embedded in the soul.
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: a letter to Kuntz, April 4, 1932; as quoted in ”Marsden Hartley”, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press 1988, New York p. 124 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- 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, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: 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 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- 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, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: 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 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- ..(they) maintain an enviable balance between the material & spiritual worlds (so) they symbolize for me the term ideal. (remark on the Mason family where Hartley stayed, 1938 – 1941) .
* Marsden Hartley, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: letter to Kuntz, September 9, 1936; as quoted in ”Marsden Hartley”, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press 1988, New York p. 124-125 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- 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, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: a letter to Adelaide Kuntz, October 24, 1939; as quoted in ”Marsden Hartley”, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press 1988, New York p. 130 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
- 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, source of his artist quotes on painting art, spirituality, poems & life: a letter to Kuntz, February 2, 1940; as quoted in ”Marsden Hartley”, by Gail R. Scott, Abbeville Publishers, Cross River Press 1988, New York p. 147 (great painter of American modernism and famous for his abstract and symbolic paintings of wide landscapes / still lifes, art writings and theory; at the bottom more biography and life history facts)
not sourced artist quotes of Marsden Hartley; famous painter in American Modernism
- 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. (1919, artist quote by Marsden Hartley).
- 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. (artist quote by Hartley, from his essay in 1942, fh)
Marsden Hartley, short biography facts on the American painter artist, creating abstract and representational paintings; landscape and portraits
Hartley created abstract as well as representational paintings, like portraits of fishermen and paintings of American landscapes; he was a deeply spiritual artist who was attracted by writings and poems of mystical American poets like Whitman and Emerson; he wrote also spiritual poems himself, as well as essays and diary notes.
Marsden Hartley was an painter who – as an American exception- raveled and painted a lot as empathic painter in Europe; mainly in Germany and France. So he became very familiar with Cézanne and the Blue Rider artists (Kandinsky and Franz Marc). He strongly admired Kandinsky’s spiritual ideas on art and also Cezanne’s landscape paintings; Hartley stayed quite a while on the locations in France where Cezanne had painted his landscapes. American and European mysticism was an important inspiration source for Hartley’s painting art and life.
Back in America Marsden Hartley became the painter of the huge and rough American – almost modern Romantic – landscapes, brushed in a very firm and expressive way. During his last years he stayed with fishermen and made very expressive, simple and strong portraits of these people. Religion kept always very present in his paqinting art and thoughts.
Hartley had a friendly relation with the photographer Stieglitz who organized many exhibitions for the American Modernism painters like Hartley and Stieglitz’s own – much younger – wife, the famous woman painter Georgia O’Keeffe.
links for more biography information and artist life facts of the famous American modernist painter Marsden Hartley
* biography of the famous American painter artist Marsden Hartley, on Wikipedia
