FEBRUARY 01 - MARCH 31, 2001
"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."—Marsden Hartley
Hackett Freedman Gallery presents a rare exhibition of more than a dozen works by pioneer American modernist Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), February 1 to March 31, 2001. Peter Selz, art historian and founding curator of the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley, writes the accompanying catalogue essay.
Hartley, considered one of America's most original and powerful early 20th century artists, has rarely been exhibited in the Bay Area (last in 1981 at UC Berkeley's University Art Museum). Hackett-Freedman Gallery's exhibition offers a selection of a dozen landscape, figure and still life paintings from the 1930's and 1940's, when he was painting in the "sophisticated primitive" manner that he was to continue until his death in 1943.
Together, these works exemplify Hartley's exploration and experimentation with a variety of subjects and forms in his ceaseless quest to plumb the spiritual essence beneath life’s surface. Hartley's Transcendentalist belief that the godhead has its counterpart in nature and animates all its forms, and his view of the artist as chronicler of life's flux and underlying unity, sets Hartley apart from his Modernist peers in both America and Europe. Hartley's preoccupation with the "palpitancy" (his words) beneath the surface, and his strivings for "an art that emerged directly out of felt experience," writes monograph author Gail R. Scott, had a profound effect on later artists such as Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, and Alex Katz.
This exhibition includes important representational works such as Hartley's 1933 view of the "Alpspitze," a mountain in Bavaria that was the locus for numerous works by him. The serenity of the alpine landscape village in Garmish-Partenkirchen 1933-34, reflects the security that Hartley found in view of this sentinel mountain, which became a natural metaphor for age and wisdom; in Hartley's words, a landscape "of the mind as much as of nature."
A classic American landscape motif for Hartley, Boulders, Dogtown (Mass.), c. 1931, reveals his synthesis of Expressionism and Romanticism. This rocky and difficult terrain, which Hartley painted again and again, is depicted with blunt, blocky forms and massive volumes outlined strongly in black. This "metaphysical" landscape reflects the influences of European painters from Matisse to Kandinsky, but its primitive, "savage" beauty and its compressed composition are Hartley's alone.
On the Beach (1940) is a major figurative painting from a series Hartley executed in Old Orchard Beach, Maine. These paintings are lyrical statements of man's comic/heroic poles. The heightened physicality of the ordinary people depicted contains echoes of American Folk Art as well as Greek Kouros figures, with their staring eyes and blocky heads and bodies; still another view suggests they are portraits of nature much as any Hartley still life or landscape.
Two Gulls (1940-43) completed near the end of Hartley's life, is testament to his "myopic observation" of a subject. Hartley considered these paintings, their subjects isolated at close range, 'portraits,' and this is a poetic meditation on life.
Hartley's work is also fascinating as it reveals the influence of both European modernism, the Northern Romantic painters of the early renaissance, and the American Luminists, especially Albert Pinkham Ryder, transmuted into Hartley's utterly independent approach where form and content coalesce into pure elegy. One critic has described Hartley as fusing the European modernist tradition (spontaneity of color, direct expression, flattened, simplified forms, breakdown of traditional spatial relationships) with his independent American spirit to "stand whole and free, at once the undeniable citizen of the world and his own imagination."