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Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism Curator, Heather Hole, Assistant Curator, Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Between 1918 and 1924, Hartley painted the New Mexico landscape again and again, while living first in Taos and Santa Fe, then in New York, and finally in Europe. He traveled to New Mexico with the hope that painting directly from nature would purify him and his work, allowing him to develop an original, uniquely American style. Instead, his work evolved into a complex meditation on distance, loss, and the aftermath of World War I. This exhibition, that includes 42 works, examines Marsden Hartley's search for a new modern American art in New Mexico, repositioning his New Mexico period as an important part of career, and bringing together many of these paintings and pastels for the first time. Marsden Hartley was arguably one of the most brilliant and complicated of the American modernists. A member of the circle of artists around Alfred Stieglitz, the well-known photographer, gallery owner, and husband of Georgia O'Keeffe, he first became known to Stieglitz and the New York art world in 1909 for his innovative depictions of his home state of Maine. Later, Hartley was at the forefront of the revolutionary experimentations in abstraction taking place in Germany in 1913 and 1914. World War I forced Hartley to return home in 1915, however, and Hartley began to question European-style modernism because he saw it as the product of a culture that had produced the massive devastation of World War I. He began to look for a way to create an independent, American modern art that did not draw on European tradition. Hartley decided to seek this new American art in the West. He arrived in Taos in June of 1918 at the invitation of arts patron Mabel Dodge. He began creating spontaneous and naturalistic pastels of the area, including Pueblo Mountain, which depicts the view of Taos Mountain from Mabel Dodge's property. Bright and engaging, Hartley's Taos pastels are some of the most representational works of his entire career. But Hartley was still working toward defining a style with which to depict New Mexico in oil paint when he left the state for New York in the fall of 1919. After he left New Mexico, Hartley continued to paint the landscape from memory through 1924. He depicted New Mexico from a greater and greater distance, first from New York and then from Europe. In New York between 1919 and 1921, Hartley painted bright, forceful oils of New Mexico. More vigorous than the paintings executed in New Mexico, these works grew increasingly stylized and imaginative. In Landscape, New Mexico for example, the land and sky merge together, the clouds echo the mountain peaks, and the landscape recedes with almost no indication of a horizon line. Hartley left the United States for Europe in 1921, yet he could not leave New Mexico behind. Hartley began painting the powerful New Mexico Recollections series in Berlin in 1923. These extraordinary works are among the most complex and multilayered depictions of the American landscape produced between the wars. When taken as a whole, the tumultuous Recollections depict a landscape of memory and fantasy, closer to a dreamscape than the kind of concrete landscape depicted in the early New Mexico pastels. In Hartley's New Mexico work, we are confronted by the complexity and depth of American modernism between the wars. The evolution of his work allows us to understand a more uncertain, even wounded version of post World War I American art than we see elsewhere. It also shows us a very different portrayal of New Mexico than the work of his contemporary Georgia O'Keeffe. Hartley stopped painting New Mexico five years before Georgia O'Keeffe began painting it, and his New Mexico work is both a precursor and a mirror image to hers. Where O'Keeffe lived in New Mexico for decades and remained largely rooted in depicting recognizable landscape forms, Hartley's New Mexico paintings became a personal vision of a distant, turbulent, and haunted landscape.The exhibition catalogue, which was published by the Yale University Press, includes an introduction by Barbara Buhler Lynes, and an essay by Heather Hole. It is available through the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum book store. Other Exhibition Locations and Dates: Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas: June 14 – August 24, 2008O'Keeffe Museum members at the Supporter level ($150) and above can see this exhibit at its traveling locations using their reciprocal privileges benefit from the Art Museum Reciprocal Network, the Modern and Contemporary Reciprocal Museum Association and the North American Reciprocal Membership Museums – including FREE admission and discounts – at more than 170 museums nationwide and in Canada. Click here to learn more. Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism was organized by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. This exhibition was made possible by the National Endowment for the Arts as part of its American Masterpieces Program and The Burnett Foundation. Additional support for this exhibition and for related programs has been received from The Annenberg Foundation, The Kerr Foundation, the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission and 1% Lodgers Tax, New Mexico Tourism Department, New Mexico Arts (a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs), JP Morgan Chase Foundation, William Randolph Hearst Foundation, the Kaiserman-Robinson Family, and Members of the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum. Click here to read the current exhibition guide.
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Marsden Hartley, New Mexico Recolleciton No. 13, c. 1923. Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 in. Collection of Eric and Debbie Green.
Marsden Hartley, New Mexico Lanscape, 1919. Oil on canvas, 20 x 32 in. Curstis Galleries, Minneapolis.
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