Marsden Hartley at Colby College.
This Summer and Fall, Colby College in Waterville, Maine, is mounting an exhibition of Maine based work by Marsden Hartley. The exhibition is a collaboration between the Colby College Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, focuses on Maine inspired work, which Hartley did before and after his landmark European paintings. The 90 works reflect an artist with a deep sense of place and how he struggled to meld his Maine roots and love of that rugged landscape and its people with European modernism and his experiences with the Berlin avant-garde. The work reflects a range of influences - early work with heavy impasto and a pointillist exploration of color; his "black landscapes", murky, nocturnal landscapes with echoes of Albert Pinkham Ryder (including a somewhat bizarre portrait of Ryder that Hartley painted years after meeting him), and Hartley's repeated versions of Mt. Katahdin that echo Cezanne's lifelong relationship with Mount Sainte Victoire. In Hartley's Maine, light emanates from the colors of his palette - rich, saturated hues juxtaposed with dark landscape masses - but the light of nature does not appear to be his primary concern. Rather, the shapes of the paintings lock together like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, not unlike the close relationship that he continually expressed of the people of Maine and their singular landscape. An online version of the exhibition can be seen at The Met website.
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AuthorMichael Farrell is on the Art faculty of Montgomery College. Things Seen looks at some of the things he has seen that might be of interest. ArchivesCategories |