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Marsden Hartley Quotes
1877–1943 United States
Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 – September 2, 1943) was an American Modernist painter and poet in the early 20th century. He lived and worked several years in Europe (Germany and France, Aix en Provence).
United States Painters Poets Random Marsden Hartley quote
19 quotes
..the virtue of Yankee upbringing spiritually speaking is of more downright value to me than any past heritages.
I don’t want to escape via intellectual ruses – I want affirmations via passionate embraces & you can’t have life unless you live it.
My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape.
..[Picasso had] a depth of understanding and insight into the inwardness of things.. ..doing very exceptional things of a most abstract psychic nature..
It is never difficult to see images – when the principle of the image is embedded in the soul.
I am not a 'book of the month' artist, and I do not paint pretty pictures; but when I am no longer here my name will register forever in the history of American art.
I could never be French, I could never become German – I shall always remain American – the essence which is in me is American mysticism just as Davies declared it when he saw those first landscapes.
They [The Mason family where Hartley stayed 1935 - 1941] maintain an enviable balance between the material & spiritual worlds (so) they symbolize for me the term ideal.
They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun; they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression of direct experience.
Blake would not laugh at my fantasies if he saw them [in contrary to the public in New York, as Hartley realized well, before]
..by getting as close to the true idea of religion, of spirituality as it is possible for us to get.. .. we would be in possession of the only tangible relationship tot the deity in things.
They want Americans to be American, and yet they offer little or no spiritual sustenance for their growth and welfare [quote on the critics who push to stop his long European stay and to return]
For wine, they drank the ocean – for bread, they ate their own despairs; counsel from the moon was theirs – for the foolish contention - Murder is not a pretty thing – yet seas do raucous everything to make it pretty – for the foolish or the brave, a way seas have.
These people [the Mason-family in Nova Scotia] have that sort of incandescence, which is peculiar to those who know the meaning of simplicity & humility. They are illumined from within makes them essentially mystical in their sense of life.
My work embodies little visions of the great intangible.. ..Some will say he’s gone mad – others will look and say he’s looked in at the lattices of Heaven and come back with the madness of splendor on him.
[I was] happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method.. .. rendering the God-spirit in the mountains.
I have achieved the 'sacred' pilgrimage to Ktaadn MT – exceeding all my expectations so far that I am sort of helpless with words. I feel as if I have seen God for the first time, and find him so nonchalantly solemn.
Every painter must traverse for himself that distance from Paris to Aix (Aix-en-Provence where Paul Cézanne frequently painted in open air] or from Venice to Toledo [where w:El Greco lived and painted for many years]. Expression is for one knowing its own pivot. Every expressor relates solely to himself – that is the concern of the individualist.
My work is getting stronger & stronger and more intense all the time.. ..I have such a rush of new energy & notions coming into my head, over my horizon like chariots of fire that all I want is freedom to step aside and execute them.