American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Collection of Charles and Virginia Bowden

Exhibited

(Possibly) Intimate Gallery, New York, New York, January 1929.

Note

This work is included in the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project: Complete Paintings and Works on Paper, Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine, Gail R. Scott, director.

Marsden Hartley was an important figure of the New York avant-garde movement of the 1910s, long associated with Alfred Stieglitz’s legendary Gallery 291, which is credited for introducing European Modernism to American collectors. In 1912, with the financial support of Arthur B. Davies, the artist travelled to Europe, where he encountered the work of Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, who would become lifelong inspirations, as exemplified by the present still life.

Recalling Cézanne's flat taple top still lifes, Still Life with Fruit is a work of pictorial investigation, showcasing Hartley's intense geometric distillation of form. Here, the artist fuses the tabletop, the tablecloth and the neutral background into a blur of interlocking Cubist-like shards of colors and shapes. Following his meeting with American poet Walt Whitman in New York in 1899, Hartley believed that an artist's subject matter represented a form of self-portraiture, and often used his paintings, especially his still lifes, as vehicles for his own personal thoughts, referencing the most intimate parts of his life. It is tempting to see a coded male symbolism in the present work. The phallic pears would then become a way to suggest the artist's buried same-sex desires, here sublimized by a spiritual and delicate sensibility.