Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Paul Rosenberg & Co., New York

Private collection, New York

Exhibited:

An American Place, New York (Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery from 1929-1946)

An American Place, Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York, May 24-July 19, 1981

The Heart of the Matter: The Still Lifes of Marsden Hartley, Berry-Hill Galleries, New York, May 6-June 27, 2003

Recorded:

Brockett, Eric. “American Still Life: Modernist Influences in the Twentieth Century,” Antiques and Fine Art (summer 2007): 134-141.

Throughout his career, Marsden Hartley employed the tenets of various styles, including post-impressionism, cubism, and expressionism, in creating his highly sensitive and personal works of art. In each case he proved himself to be a painter of remarkable range and insight. His aesthetic sensibility was defined by a highly developed sense of spirituality fused with intellect and was influenced by American transcendentalist writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Their belief in the great emotional benefits of contact with nature became a defining feature of Hartley’s art.

A searching soul who looked for peace in travel and change of scenery, Hartley was affiliated with many of the defining persons and events of twentieth-century art. In 1909, he met the important New York artist and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, who not only gave him his first solo exhibition but also introduced him to the work of Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. He visited Paris in 1912, becoming a regular at the salon of Gertrude and Leo Stein, and then spent time in Berlin, where he befriended many members of the Blaue Reiter group. In later years, he lived in New Mexico, Maine, Paris again, Bermuda and Nova Scotia.

Suffused with an elegiac feeling, despite the luscious beauty of the roses, Roses for Seagulls that Lost their Way may reference a tragic incident in the artist’s personal life. In 1936, while Hartley was staying with his friends, the Masons, in Nova Scotia, the family’s two sons, to whom the artist had grown especially close, and a cousin drowned during a fierce storm. The title of the work, with its allusion to being lost at sea, supports this interpretation.

Hartley’s mastery in the application of paint and as a colorist is fully evident here: the paint is thickly applied in some areas, yet remains delicate. The white roses are placed against a vibrant red background, and echo the red in the flowers’ centers along with yellow and subtle touches of purple. The green stems of the roses, lightened at their centers by a lighter green/yellow and small dabs of teal, seem to encase the flowers, while also threatening to overrun them. A white ribbon, which is arranged in the shape of a semi-abstracted seagull, ties them together. Roses for Seagulls that Lost their Way achieves a synthesis of emotion and nature: it is a bittersweet painting, mournful, yet executed brilliantly and with great beauty.