Marsden Hartley

When I read O'Keef's biography Portrait of an Artist, I highlighted Marsden's words about her feet*. Throughout that book I read his name and several quotes by him but I don't really remember looking at his art before. The last quote below exactly describes my own experience the Marsden double-sided painting I encountered at Crystal Bridges in the O'Keefe/Stieglitz exhibit. I just now read the aforementioned link to the CB blog post about their discovering(!!!) the other side of the painting when reframing.

"Front"

"Back"

I have (out of desperation) painted on the back side of other paintings because I could not afford to buy new canvas. This experience is always a bit sickening but ultimately (and usually fortunately) the need to carry a new vision prevails. I saw Marsden's hasty brush strokes and wet-on-wet colors and identified with his "need" in such a deep, deep way.

On Marsden's 58th birthday he burned over 100 of his paintings because he could not afford to "store" them. In case you are wondering, his paintings now hang in museums and sell for hundreds of thousands...if you can find one for sale. As his importance as a Modern American artist continues to be realized, so will the cost his work.


In Marsden's own words:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.


*Grounding/Connection via feet is an important, personal psychological concept to me. It's why my feet are usually found in leather Wayfarers these days. From Portrait: "'Georgia O'Keefe has had her feet scorched in the laval effusiveness of terrible experience', wrote Hartley in 1921 in his exaggerated style. Her work reflected a realistic understanding of the ability of life to silence 'the spirit of adventure.'"