Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Marsden Hartley
American; 20th-century
Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery
67%
Waterfall, Morse Pond. c1940. Oil on board
For the most part Hartley's painted surfaces are never pure paint — pure surface — which is what gives his work its homey charm but which is also what limits it. The blacks that make up the black riverbed in this painting are, here and there, mitigated by daubs of brown or green; there's a streakiness to the trees and to the pools of water. This all strikes one as fickle, even if it’s pretty. This tendency of Hartley's to smooth out his pictures’ rough spots with little realistic effects is the main problem in his pictures. Occasionally, though, it works against itself — just look at the touches of thin red paint decorating the bottom eighth of this image. They’re sitting so carelessly on top of the picture plane. This, along with the unimpeded hardness of the white-grey falling water, is what this painting's done right. (TFS, 2025)
Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Exhibition: Hartley | Hopper: Drawings from Two New England Collections)
67%
Standing Male Figure, N. 2. no date. Ink on paper
It's clearest in his later figurative work that Hartley studied Cézanne, but he tended to forgo the French artist's obsession with the totality of a picture (Cézanne's paintings hinge on every background stroke, every infinitesimal shred of visual information) in favor of a focus on the bodiless of his depicted objects. That is, there's often a lot of latency and unelaborated space in Hartley, which makes room for his figures to come through in a sort of isolated fullness of form. This can leave his finished artworks feeling somewhat like studies, which is why actual studies like this one may feel more complete than the paintings they eventually led to. It's all in the nude's right shoulder, the way it pushes forward without coming to occupy a different plane from the rest of its body: this drawing somehow conveys movement in space without also conveying space. It's as if Hartley is putting back together the fragments which Cézanne ranged out before him. Too bad he could only do so under the protective cover of the limitations which drawings impose. (TFS, 2025)
Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Exhibition: Hartley | Hopper: Drawings from Two New England Collections)
58%
Fish Nets and Lobster Traps. no date. Ink on paper
Something about the hatching seems suspiciously like popular illustration, but something about the drawing in toto seems like serious art. Maybe this is it: the objects on the outskirts of the image are easily identifiable, but the mass they surround is a void where all visual information is being effaced. There's an abstractness at play here, but it's not the typical abstractness of modernism — it's an absence of signification sharing a pictorial field with untroubled representation, which is provocative. (Hartley even establishes some perspective through the suggestion of a wood-plank floor in the foreground, and then he undermines it by tossing the lobster traps up into empty nonreceding space.) All that said, the thickness of Hartley's lines and the cartoonish hyperactivity of his composition makes it tough to take this drawing completely seriously. The interest we take in it is more conceptual than visual. (TFS, 2025)
Provincetown, MA: Provincetown Art Association and Museum (Exhibition: Hartley | Hopper: Drawings from Two New England Collections)
54%
Preliminary drawing for Christ Held by Half-Naked Men. no date. Graphite on paper
Hartley's scratched-out linework is better suited to vigorous shading than to limning and implication. (His paintings suffer from a lack of subtlety in their design, for which he tended to compensate with an intensity to his handling of paint.) But this is a quick study for a larger work, so it shouldn't be held to too high a standard. Mostly it's unremarkable, but one thing is worth noting: the pathos Hartley has wrung from his figures by hanging their heads at slightly different angles. The five half-nudes are indistinguishable in their bodies (the finished painting wouldn't change this much), but their visages, comprising just a few lines each, convey substantially different internal worlds and roles within the scene. This speaks to Hartley's ability as a student of the body and the ways it makes meaning, if not necessarily as a draftsman. (TFS, 2025)