ON VIEW

(For biographical information on Marsden Hartley, see entry under Hartley, Raptus 1965.4)

After spending much of his career away from his home state, in 1937 Hartley returned to Maine to pass the last years of his life. Reversing his earlier stance, he embraced Maine's landscape and people, celebrating them as forces that shaped his essence. Sea-swept rocks, deep pine forests, rugged fishermen and loggers became the subjects of Hartley's late paintings, articulating what the artist termed his "nativeness."

In the summer of 1939 Hartley stayed with friends Clair Spencer and John Evans at "Bagaduce Farm" in West Brookville, Maine. There he made studies of felled timber waiting to be transported downstream. Abundance depicts a towering stack of pine logs that seem to have jammed up against the picture plane itself. Canted at dynamic angles, they choke the river on which they float. An axe in the lower right testifies to the hardihood and industry of the absent loggers, while in the background, a dense wall of green promises an endless supply of trees for lumber and pulp.

As with many of Hartley's later paintings, the forms in Abundance are stark, monumental, and almost crude in execution. Outlined in thick black strokes, they embody the primitive strength that the artist saw in nearly every aspect of his native land. Setting aside accepted pictorial rules, Hartley overwhelms the canvas with great piles of monotonous brown logs, sacrificing niceties of color and composition to create an impression of burgeoning excess. The resulting picture, while not beautiful in the conventional sense, is powerfully expressive of raw vitality.

Abundance was first exhibited in 1940 at the Hudson Walker Galleries in New York City. Included in a show of Hartley's recent Maine work, it was praised by a reviewer in The Art Digest who noted:

There are several studies of felled timber in the show, a subject which gives Hartley some of his happiest results. The huge brown logs piled or floating in the water, the white countryside, and the deep green of the forest provide opportunities to express what he feels of New England: its ruggedness and the toughness of its landscape.(1)

In a letter to Charles Edward Buckley, former director of the Currier Museum of Art, noted art critic Elizabeth McCausland characterized Abundance as a "good, strong example of Hartley's later work."(2) She also remarked that the painting may have been designed as part of a set of decorative wall panels to be used in a functional setting. Hartley had begun to contemplate making murals, "ikons," and other site-specific works during the second half of the 1930s. Although there is no direct evidence that Abundance was intended as such, Hartley may have been inspired by his friend, the painter Waldo Peirce (1884-1970), whose 1937 mural for the Westbrook, Maine, post office celebrated Maine's logging industry.

Unfortunately, Hartley died before he could develop a coherent approach to mural painting. Abundance remained in the hands of dealers until it was acquired by the Currier Museum of Art in 1959.

VSD

NOTES

1. "The 'New' Hartley Emerges from Down East," Art Digest XIV, no. 12 (March 15, 1940): 8.
2. Elizabeth McCausland to Charles Edward Buckley, March 2, 1959. Letter contained in object file, Currier Museum of Art.

REFERENCES

Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, ed. Marsden Hartley. Ex. cat. Wadsworth Atheneum in association with Yale University Press, 2002.

Bruce Robertson. Marsden Hartley. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1995.

Gail R. Scott. Marsden Hartley. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988.

"The 'New' Hartley Emerges from Down East." The Art Digest XIV, no. 12 (March 15, 1940): 8.