An exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art of paintings by Marsden Hartley reconfirms his enduring place in the American canon
By David Masello
Still Life, 1922.
Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art.
Marsden Hartley was always restless. For his entire working life, the self-designated “painter of Maine” was always on the move—a dynamic that has resulted in a vast archive of completed paintings, drawings, sketches, and keepsakes, some of the most powerful examples of which go on view soon at the New Mexico Museum of Art, in Santa Fe. “Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts” (April 5–July 25), reveals through some 40 paintings and drawings that the artist not only spent much of his life in transit, but that while doing so he continued to explore and expand upon the mediums and messages he wished to convey. Wherever he was, he rendered the place with such vividness that it felt as if that specific locale was the one most important to him.
El Santo, 1919,
Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art.
His stops included Lewiston, Maine, where he was born in 1877, but from there he went on to New York, Berlin, Paris, Mexico, Canada, Bermuda, Italy, New Mexico, and elsewhere. “Figuring out how to hang this exhibition was very easy,” says Christian Waguespack, Head of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of 20th-Century Art at the New Mexico Museum of Art. “I arranged the show chronologically, which gives an order to where he was in the world when he painted the works.” While the show originated at the Bates College Museum of Art in Maine, which holds in its collection 400 artworks and objects by Hartley, making it the largest repository of his works anywhere, Waguespack was responsible for not simply replicating the show, but, rather, expanding upon it and presenting it as he wished his museum to do. What we see on view here is the result of Waguespack’s vision.
“Upon deciding to go with this show,” he says, “it was very much a collaboration between me and The Vilcek Foundation.” Waguespack is referring to the New York City–based foundation that was established in 2000 by Jan and Marica Vilcek, immigrants from the former Czechoslovakia, whose stated mission, in part, is “to honor immigrant contributions to the United States.” While Hartley was decidedly American-born, his wanderlust appealed to Emily Schuchardt Navratil, the Vilcek’s curator, an aspect of his life that imbued him with a kind of immigrant status, a man of and from many nations. As she wrote at the time that she established relations with the Bates museum to mount the show, “Their unparalleled Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection illuminated so many facets of Hartley: not only as an artist, but as a wandering soul. It is my hope that audiences are similarly drawn by the combination of Harley’s art in conversation with a lifetime of personal mementos and artifacts.”
New Mexico Recollection #14, 1923.
The Jan. T. and Marica Vilcek Collection
The Foundation’s President, Rick Kinsel, adds, “The people and places that Hartley encountered through his travels had a profound impact on his development as an artist. His ability to integrate these varied influences is precisely what makes his works so striking.”
Jan and Marica Vilcek not only promote artists and fund exhibitions, but they loan out much of what they own. Twenty-two of the Hartley works in this exhibition come from their foundation’s archives. Waguespack has augmented the show with the three paintings by Hartley that are in the collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art—El Santo (1919), Rocks in Water (1922-23), and Still Life (1922).
Although Hartley spent a short amount of time in New Mexico, from 1918 to 1919, his El Santo is a kind of paean to the land and its people, what Waguespack calls “one of the cornerstones of our collection.” The scene, a still life, depicts, among other elements, a curvaceous black pot from which desert flora sprouts, a striped Mexican blanket, and a painted iconic Hispanic scene of a saint carrying a cross. “This is a significant painting for us to have because it was one of the first Hartley had done while he was here in the Southwest,” says Waguespack. “It’s significant also because of all the themes it picks up on—Hispanic culture and the Indigenous culture, which makes the work a quintessentially American creation, and unique to this place.”