Pastoral refers to the lifestyle of shepherds.

In art, be it literature, painting, or another form, it refers to rural subjects such as villages, herdsmen, and milkmaids, that are romanticized and depicted in a highly unrealistic manner.

The pastoral genre was invented in the Hellenistic era by the Sicilian poet Theocritus, who may have drawn on authentic folk traditions of Sicilian shepherds. The Roman poet Vergil adopted the invention and wrote eclogues, which are poems on rustic and bucolic subjects, that set an example for the pastoral mood in literature. Later pastoral poets, such as Edmund Spenser and William Wordsworth, typically looked to the classical pastoral poets for inspiration. A typical mood is set by Christopher Marlowe's well known lines from "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love":

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.
There will we sit upon the rocks
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

Pastoral shepherds and maidens usually had Greek names like Poliphilus or Philomela. Pastoral poems were often set in Arcadia, a rural region of Greece, mythological home of the god Pan, which was portrayed as a sort of Eden by the poets. The tasks of their employment with sheep and other rustic chores were held in the fantasy to be almost wholly undemanding and backgrounded, and to leave the shepherdesses and their swains in a state of almost perfect leisure. This made them available for embodying perpetual erotic fantasies. The shepherds spent their time chasing pretty girls --- or, at least in the Greek and Roman versions, pretty lads as well. The eroticism of Vergil's second eclogue, Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin ("The shepherd Corydon burned with passion for pretty Alexis") is entirely homosexual.

A harsher note was struck in Girolamo Fracastoro's 1530 poem Syphilis, sive Morbus Gallicus ("Syphilis, or the French Disease"), in which Syphilus ("pig-lover"), a typical pastoral name for a shepherd, is stricken by the disease syphilis that takes its name from Fracastoro's poem. Fracastoro's poem contains the first recognisable description of the symptoms of syphilis; today, far too few contemporary physicians announce their discoveries in verse, pastoral or otherwise. Fracastoro has Syphilus the shepherd catch it for having offended Apollo, a somewhat unusual method of infection. Fracastoro's Latin poem was much admired in its day; it was translated into English heroic couplets by Nahum Tate:

A shepherd once (distrust not ancient fame)
Possest these Downs, and Syphilus his Name;
Some destin'd Head t'attone the Crimes of all,
On Syphilus the dreadful Lot did fall.
Through what adventures this unknown Disease
So lately did astonisht Europe seize,
Through Asian coasts and Libyan Cities ran,
And from what Seeds the Malady began,
Our Song shall tell: to Naples first it came
From France, and justly took from France his Name. . .

Pastoral paintings, likewise, were typically used to give the respectability of the classics to paintings of nymphs, swains, satyrs, and other mostly human legendary creatures frolicking in neatly tended hills and woods in a state of perpetual déshabillé. The pastoral genre is very little used in contemporary times, which is in itself remarkable; here is a whole genre of sexual fantasy that has fallen almost completely out of fashion.

See also: Et in Arcadia ego

External links

  • The "Pastoral" is the name usually given to Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F-Major (Op. 68).
  • Pastoral can also be used to describe the professional role of the Christian clergy.

Luminism

American art movement of the 19th cent. Luminism was an outgrowth of the Hudson River school. In its concern for capturing the effects of light and atmosphere it is sometimes linked to impressionism. Its practitioners included Frederick E. Church (in his early career), Fitz Hugh Lane, John F. Kensett, Sanford R. Gifford, and Martin Johnson Heade. They painted majestic landscapes and seascapes bathed in the mystical light of a pristine sky with an emphasis on Nature's grand scale.(TMH)


See also: List of painters,

Fairfield Porter

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Fairfield Porter (June 10, 1907 - September 18, 1975) was an American painter and art critic.

Largely self-taught, he produced representational work in the midst of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

His subjects were primarily landscapes, domestic interiors and portraits of family, friends and fellow artists; many set in or around the family house on Spruce Head Island, Maine.

His painterly vision which encompassed a fascination with nature and the ability to reveal extraordinariness in ordinary life was heavily indebted to the French painters Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard. He said once, "When I paint, I think that what would satisfy me is to express what Bonnard said Renoir told him: make everything more beautiful."

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfield_Porter"
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Rockwell Kent (1882-1971), an American artist was born in Tarrytown, New York, was well educated in art. He did his first significant work at Monhegan Island, Maine. Later he traveled widely, doing other landscape work. He also did a great deal of work illustrating working people, serving as an illustrator for The Masses, a popular left-wing magazine.

Approach in 1926 by publisher R. R. Donnelley to produce an illustrated edition of Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, Kent suggested Moby Dick instead. Published in 1930, the deluxe edition sold out immediately; a lower-priced Random House edition became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. A previously obscure book, Moby Dick was rediscovered by critics in the 1920s. The success of the Rockwell Kent illustrated edition was a factor in its becoming the recognized classic it is today.

He was a victim of McCarthyism during the 1950s. As a devotee of realistic art, he had also fallen from popular favor.

External Links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockwell_Kent"
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Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 - May 15, 1967) was an American painter, best remembered for his eerily realistic depictions of solitude in contemporary American life.

Born in Nyack, New York, Hopper studied commercial art and painting in New York City. His most important teacher - and perhaps the greatest influence on his professional work - was artist Robert Henri, who encouraged his students to use their art to "make a stir in the world." He was also a proponent of realistic depictions of urban life, and his students, many of which became important artists, became known as the "Ashcan School" of American Art.

Upon completing his formal education, Hopper made three trips to Europe to study the emerging art scene there, but unlike so many of his contemporaries, who imitated the abstract cubist experiments, Hopper was enamored of the idealism of the realist painters. His early projects reflect this; though they are in no way as exceptional as his better known, later work.

While he worked for several years as a commercial artist, Hopper continued painting. In 1925 he produced House by the Railroad, a classic work that signified his attaining artistic maturity. The work is the first of a series of stark urban and rural scenes based on sharp lines and large shapes, played on by unusual lighting to capture the lonely mood of his subjects. His subject matter was derived from the very common feature of American life, including gas stations, motels, the railroad, or an empty street.

NightHawks 1942
bad imitation of Hoppers famous painting

Perhaps the most famous of these is Nighthawks (http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/hopper/p22-hawks.html) (1942), showing the lonely customers frequenting an all-night diner downtown. The diner's harsh electric lights set it off from the more gentle night outside. The diners, seated at stools around the counter, are similarly isolated from one another, leaving the viewer to wonder what sad lives could have led them to the diner at this time of night.

Hopper's rural New England scenes such as Gas (http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/hopper/p22-gas.html) (1940) are no less wistful. In terms of his subject matter, he can be compared to his contemporary, Norman Rockwell. But while Rockwell exalted in the rich imagery of small-town America, Hopper seems to find in it that same sense of forlorn solitude that permeates his portrayal of city life. Here too, Hopper's work exploits vast empty spaces, represented by a lonely gas station astride an empty country road and the sharp contrast between the natural light of the sky, moderated by the lush forest, and glaring artificial light coming from inside the gas station.

Hopper died in 1967, in his studio near Washington Square, in New York City. His wife, the painter Josephine Nivison, who died 10 months later, bequeathed his work to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Other important paintings by Hopper can be found at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago.

External links

An Edward Hopper Scrapbook (http://americanart.si.edu/collections/exhibits/hopper/), compiled by the staff of the Smithsonian American Art Museum

Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 - September 29, 1910) was an American painter.

Image:WinslowHomer.jpeg

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Homer started an apprenticeship to the Boston commercial lithographer at the age of 19. By 1857 he had started an independent career, employed as a free-lance illustrator for such magazines as Ballou's Pictorial and Harper's Weekly.

In 1859 he opened his own studio in New York City, where began his career as a painter.

Harper's sent Homer to the front during the American Civil War, where he did sketches of battle scenes and mundane camp life. Although these did not gain him much note at the time, they were to influence much of his later work.

Back at his studio after the war, Homer set to work on several war-related paintings, among them Sharpshooter on Picket Duty and Prisoners from the Front. After exhibiting at the National Academy of Design, Homer traveled to France in 1867 and began practicing painting landscapes while continuing to work for Harper's. He began to paint in watercolor, and in 1875 he ended his career as a commercial illustrator, concentrating on his painting.

Image:CloudShadows.jpeg
Cloud Shadows, 1890

Homer began to gain acclaim as a painter in the late 1870s and early 1880s. His 1872 composition, Snap the Whip, was shown at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He travelled widely and spent two years (1882-83) in England, where his boyhood interest in the sea was rekindled. He moved to Prout's Neck, Maine (near Scarborough) and began painting seascapes, for which he is perhaps best known. Notable among these are Banks Fisherman, Eight Bells, Gulf Stream, Rum Cay, Mending the Nets, and Searchlight, harbor Entrance, Santiago de Cuba. In order to find locations for his seascapes, Homer often took trips to such locations as Florida and the Caribbean.

Homer died at the age of 74 in his Prout's Neck studio. His painting, Shoot the Rapids, remained unfinished. Homer's works, already in great demand during his lifetime, are widely sought today.

External link

Online Gallery of the Undisputed collection of Winslow Homer Civil War Illustrations

George Wesley Bellows (August 19, 1882 - January 8, 1925) was an American painter, known for his bold depictions of urban life in New York City.

Bellows was born in Columbus, Ohio. He attended the Ohio State University from 1901 until 1904, where he was encouraged to become a professional baseball player because of his talent, but lacked the interest. He worked as a commercial illustrator while a student, and though he continued to accept magazine assignments throughout his life, Bellows desired enough success as a painter to avoid having to rely on illustration for income. He left OSU in 1904 without graduating and moved to New York City to study art. Bellows was soon a student of Robert Henri at the New York School of Art, and associated with Henri's "The Eight" and the Ashcan School, a group of artists who advocated painting contemporary American in all its forms. By 1906, Bellows was renting his own studio.

Bellows first achieved notice in 1908, when he and other pupils of Henri organized an exhibition of mostly urban studies. Many critics considered these to be crudely painted, but others found them welcomely audacious and a step beyond the work of their teacher. His fame grew as he contributed to other nationally recognized juried shows.

Cliff Dwellers (1913) Oil on canvas, 40 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (102.2 x 107 cm) Los Angeles County Museum of Art
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Cliff Dwellers (1913)
Oil on canvas, 40 1/4 x 42 1/8 in. (102.2 x 107 cm)
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

He is most known for his urban New York scenes, depicting the crudity and chaos of working-class people and neighborhoods, as well as social satires of the upper classes. Many of his paintings depict New York under snowfall. These exhibited a stark contrast between the blue and white expanses of snow and the rough and grimy surfaces of city structures, and created an aesthetically ironic image of the equally rough and grimy men struggling to clear away the nuisance of the pure snow. Many art scholars believe this series of winter paintings, executed from 1907 through 1915, were the main testing ground for Bellows to develop his strong sense of light and visual texture. However, Bellows' series of paintings portraying amateur boxing matches were arguably his signature contribution to art history. These paintings are characterized by dark atmospheres, through which the bright, roughly lain brushstrokes of the human figures vividly strike with a strong sense of motion and direction.

Gaining some prestige as a painter brought some changes to his work. Though he continued his earlier themes, he began to additionally receive portrait commissions from those among New York's wealthy elite, from whom he now often received social invitations, and to paint relatively placid Maine seascapes.

At the same time, the always socially conscious Bellows associated with a group of radical artists and activists called "the Lyrical Left", who tended towards anarchism in their extreme advocacy of individual rights. He taught at the first Modern School in New York City (as did his mentor, Henri), and served on the editorial board of the socialist journal, The Masses, to which he contributed many drawings and prints since 1911. He was often at odds with the other contributors, however, believing that artistic freedom should trump any editorial policy. Bellows also notably dissented from this circle in his very public support of U.S. intervention in World War I. In 1918, he created a series of lithographs and paintings that graphically depicted the atrocities committed by Germany during its invasion of Belgium. Notable among these was The Germans Arrive, which was based on an actual account and gruesomely illustrated a German soldier restraining a Belgian teen whose hands had just been severed. However, his work was also highly critical of the domestic censorship and persecution of anti-war dissenters conducted by the U.S. government under the Espionage Act.

Both Members of This Club (1909) Oil on canvas, 45 1/4 x 63 1/8 in. (115 x 160.5 cm) National Gallery of Art
Enlarge
Both Members of This Club (1909)
Oil on canvas, 45 1/4 x 63 1/8 in. (115 x 160.5 cm)
National Gallery of Art

In addition to painting, Bellows made significant contributions to lithography, and helped to expand the use of the medium as a fine art in the U.S. He installed a lithography press in his studio in 1916, and between 1921 and 1924 he collaborated with master printer Bolton Brown on more than a hundred images. Bellows also illustrated numerous books in his later career, including several by H.G. Wells.

Bellows moved to teach at the Chicago Art Institute in 1919. He died on January 8, 1925 of peritonitis, after failing to tend to a ruptured appendix. He left behind his wife, Emma, and daughters, Anne and Jean.

Paintings by Bellows are in the collections of many major American art museums, including the National Gallery of Art, and the Whitney, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Columbus Museum of Art in Bellows' hometown also has a sizeable collection of both his portraits and New York street scenes.



Milton Avery (1885-1965) was a United States painter whose works specialize in American Modernism. Although born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to Maine.

He supported himself with factory jobs and lived in obscurity. In 1917 he began working at night in order to paint in the daytime. Roy Neuberger saw his work and thought he deserved recognition. Determined to get the world to know and respect Avery's work, Neuberger bought over 100 of his paintings, starting with Gaspé Landscape, and lent or donated them to museums all over the world. With the work of Milton Avery rotating through high-profile museums, he came to be a highly respected and successful painter.
Avery's work is seminal to American abstract painting-while his work is clearly representational, it focuses on color relations rather than creating the illusion of depth as Western painting since the Renaissance has. Early in his career his work was considered too radical for being too abstract; when Abstract Expressionism became dominant his work was overlooked, as being too representational. He befriended Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko.


"Edward Hopper, the best-known American realist of the inter-war period, once said: 'The man's the work. Something doesn't come out of nothing.' This offers a clue to interpreting the work of an artist who was not only intensely private, but who made solitude and introspection important themes in his painting.

"He was born in the small Hudson River town of Nyack, New York State, on 22 July 1882. His family were solidly middle-class: his father owned a dry goods store where the young Hopper sometimes worked after school. By 1899 he had already decided to become an artist, but his parents persuaded him to begin by studying commercial illustration because this seemed to offer a more secure future. He first attended the New York School of Illustrating (more obscure than its title suggests), then in 1900 transferred to the New York School of Art. Here the leading figure and chief instructor was William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), an elegant imitator of Sargent. He also worked under Robert Henri (1869-1929), one of the fathers of American Realism - a man whom he later described as 'the most influential teacher I had', adding 'men didn't get much from Chase; there were mostly women in the class.' Hopper was a slow developer - he remained at the School of Art for seven years, latterly undertaking some teaching work himself. However, like the majority of the young American artists of the time, he longed to study in France. With his parents' help he finally left for Paris in October 1906. This was an exciting moment in the history of the Modern movement, but Hopper was to claim that its effect on him was minimal:

Whom did I meet? Nobody. I'd heard of Gertrude Stein, but I don't remember having heard of Picasso at all. I used to go to the cafés at night and sit and watch. I went to the theatre a little. Paris had no great or immediate impact on me.

"In addition to spending some months in Paris, he visited London, Amsterdam, Berlin and Brussels. The picture that seems to have impressed him most was Rembrandt's The Night Watch (in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Hopper was able to repeat his trip to Europe in 1909 and 1910. On the second occasion he visited Spain as well as France. After this, though he was to remain a restless traveller, he never set foot in Europe again. Yet its influence was to remain with him for a long time: he was well read in French literature, and could quote Verlaine in the original, as his future wife discovered (he was surprised when she finished the quotation for him). He said later: '[America] seemed awfully crude and raw when I got back. It took me ten years to get over Europe.' For some time his painting was full of reminiscences of what he had seen abroad. This tendency culminates in Soir Bleu of 1914, a recollection of the Mi-Caréme carnival in Paris, and one of the largest pictures Hopper ever painted. It failed to attract any attention when he showed it in a mixed exhibition in the following year, and it was this failure which threw him back to working on the American subjects with which his reputation is now associated. In 1913 Hopper made his first sale - a picture exhibited at the Armory Show in New York which brought together American artists and all the leading European modernists. In 1920 he had his first solo exhibition, at the Whitney Studio Club, but on this occasion none of the paintings sold. He was already thirty-seven and beginning to doubt if he would achieve any success as an artist - he was still forced to earn a living as a commercial illustrator. One way round this dilemma was to make prints, for which at that time there was a rising new market. These sold more readily than his paintings, and Hopper then moved to making watercolours, which sold more readily still.

"Hopper had settled in Greenwich Village, which was to be his base for the rest of his life, and in 1923 he renewed his friendship with a neighbour, Jo Nivison, whom he had known when they were fellow students under Chase and Henri. She was now forty; Hopper was forty-two. In the following year they married. Their long and complex relationship was to be the most important of the artist's life. Fiercely loyal to her husband, Jo felt in many respects oppressed by him. In particular, she felt that he did nothing to encourage her own development as a painter, but on the contrary did everything to frustrate it. 'Ed,' she confided to her diary, 'is the very centre of my universe... If I'm on the point of being very happy, he sees to it that I'm not.' The couple often quarrelled fiercely (an early subject of contention was Jo's devotion to her cat Arthur, whom Hopper regarded as a rival for her attention). Sometimes their rows exploded into physical violence, and on one occasion, just before a trip to Mexico, Jo bit Hopper's hand to the bone. On the other hand, her presence was essential to his work, sometimes literally so, since she now modelled for all the female figures in his paintings, and was adept at enacting the various roles he required.

"From the time of his marriage, Hopper's professional fortunes changed. His second solo show, at the Rehn Gallery in New York in 1924, was a sell-out. The following year, he painted what is now generally acknowledged to be his first fully mature picture, The House by the Railroad. With its deliberate, disciplined spareness, this is typical of what he was to create thereafter. His paintings combine apparently incompatible qualities. Modern in their bleakness and simplicity, they are also full of nostalgia for the puritan virtues of the American past - the kind of quirky nineteenth-century architecture Hopper liked to paint, for instance, could not have been more out of fashion than it was in the mid-192OS, when he first began to look at it seriously. Though his compositions are supposedly realist they also make frequent use of covert symbolism. Hopper's paintings have, in this respect, been rather aptly compared to the realist plays of Ibsen, a writer whom he admired.

"One of the themes of The House by the Railroad is the loneliness of travel, and the Hoppers now began to travel widely within the United States, as well as going on trips to Mexico. Their mobility was made possible by the fact that they were now sufficiently prosperous to buy a car. This became another subject of contention between the artist and his wife, since Hopper, not a good driver himself, resisted Jo's wish to learn to drive too. She did not acquire a driving licence until 1936, and even then her husband was extremely reluctant to allow her control of their automobile.

"By this time Hopper, whose career, once it took off, was surprisingly little affected by the Depression, had become extremely well known. In 1929, he was included in the Museum of Modern Art's second exhibition, Paintings by Nineteen Living Americans, and in 1930 The House by the Railroad entered the museum's permanent collection, as a gift from the millionaire collector Stephen Clark. In the same year, the Whitney Museum bought Hopper's Early Sunday Morning, its most expensive purchase up to that time. In 1933 Hopper was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. This was followed, in 1950, by a fuller retrospective show at the Whitney.

"Hopper became a pictorial poet who recorded the starkness and vastness of America. Sometimes he expressed aspects of this in traditional guise, as, for example, in his pictures of lighthouses and harsh New England landscapes; sometimes New York was his context, with eloquent cityscapes, often showing deserted streets at night. Some paintings, such as his celebrated image of a gas-station, Gas (1940), even have elements which anticipate Pop Art. Hopper once said: 'To me the most important thing is the sense of going on. You know how beautiful things are when you're travelling.'

"He painted hotels, motels, trains and highways, and also liked to paint the public and semi-public places where people gathered: restaurants, theatres, cinemas and offices. But even in these paintings he stressed the theme of loneliness - his theatres are often semideserted, with a few patrons waiting for the curtain to go up or the performers isolated in the fierce light of the stage. Hopper was a frequent movie-goer, and there is often a cinematic quality in his work. As the years went on, however, he found suitable subjects increasingly difficult to discover, and often felt blocked and unable to paint. His contemporary the painter Charles Burchfield wrote: 'With Hopper the whole fabric of his art seems to be interwoven with his personal character and manner of living.' When the link between the outer world he observed and the inner world of feeling and fantasy broke, Hopper found he was unable to create.

"In particular, the rise of Abstract Expressionism left him marooned artistically, for he disapproved of many aspects of the new art. He died in 1967, isolated if not forgotten, and Jo Hopper died ten months later. His true importance has only been fully realized in the years since his death."

- Text from "Lives of the Great 20th-Century Artists", by Edward Lucie-Smith

Further reading on Hopper:



Born in Lewiston, Maine, Marsden Hartley moved with his parents to Cleveland in 1892, where he attended classes at the Cleveland Art Institute. After settling in New York in 1898, he studied under William Merritt Chase and later at the National Academy of Design, but his style was most greatly affected by Albert Pinkham Ryder and the Impressionist Giovanni Segantini. He had his first one man show at Stieglitz's "291 " gallery in 1909. Through "291," he was introduced to the art of Cezanne and Picasso, whose ideas on structure he readily absorbed. While living abroad in Paris and Berlin from 1912 to 1915, his style was redirected toward abstraction by the influence of Kandinsky, Franz Marc and the Fauves. He worked in Provincetown, Maine, New Mexico, California and New York before returning to Europe in 1921. By 1920 Hartley's painting had become increasingly representational. His later landscapes, endowed with a rustic power, express a strong romantic attachment to his native land. He returned to America in 1930 and traveled extensively while working mostly in Maine. In addition to painting, Hartley also composed poetry and wrote on modern art.

- From "125 Masterpieces from the Collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery"

 

Marsden Hartley, "Art and the Personal Life," 1928

As soon as a real artist finds out what art is, the more is he likely to feel the need of keeping silent about it, and about himself in connection with it. There is almost, these days, a kind of petit scandale in the thought of allying oneself with anything of a professional nature. And it is at this point that I shrink a little from asserting myself with regard to professional aspects of art. And here the quality of confession must break through. I have joined, once and for all, the ranks of the intellectual experimentalists. I can hardly bear the sound of the words "expressionism," "emotionalism," "personality," and such, because they imply the wish to express personal life, and I prefer to have no personal life. Personal art is for me a matter of spiritual indelicacy. Persons of refined feeling should keep themselves out of their painting, and this means, of course, that the accusation made in the form of a querulous statement to me recently "that you are a perfectionist" is in the main true.

I am interested then only in the problem of painting, of how to make a better painting according to certain laws that are inherent in the making of a good picture and not at all in private extraversions or introversions of specific individuals. That is for me the inherent error in a work of art. I learned this bit of wisdom from a principle of William Blake's which I discovered early and followed far too assiduously the first half of my aesthetic life, and from which I have happily released myself and this axiom was: "Put off intellect and put on imagination; the imagination is the man." From this doctrinal assertion evolved the theoretical axiom that you don't see a thing until you look away from it which was an excellent truism as long as the principles of the imaginative life were believed in and followed. I no longer believe in the imagination. I rose one certain day and the whole thing had become changed. I had changed old clothes for new ones, and I couldn't bear the sight of the old garments. And when a painting is evolved from imaginative principles I am strongly inclined to turn away because I have greater faith that intellectual clarity is better and more entertaining than imaginative wisdom or emotional richness. I believe in the theoretical aspects of painting because I believe it produced better painting, and I think I can say I have been a fair exponent of the imaginative idea.

I have come to the conclusion that it is better to have two colors in right relation to each other than to have a vast confusion of emotional exuberance in the guise of ecstatic fullness or poetical revelation both of which qualities have, generally speaking, long since become second rate experience. I had rather be intellectually right than emotionally exuberant, and I could say this of any other aspect of my personal experience.

I have lived the life of the imagination, but at too great an expense. I do not admire the irrationality of the imaginative life. I have, if I may say so, made the intellectual grade. I have made the complete return to nature, and nature is, as we all know, primarily an intellectual idea. I am satisfied that painting also is like nature, an intellectual idea, and that the laws of nature as presented to the mind through the eye and the eye is the painter's first and last vehicle are the means of transport to the real mode of thought: the only legitimate source of aesthetic experience for the intelligent painter.

All the "isms," from Impressionism down to the present moment, have had their inestimable value and have clarified the mind and the scene of all superfluous emotionalism; the eye that turns toward nature today receives far finer and more significant reactions than previously when romanticism and the imaginative or poetic principles were the means and ways of expression.

I am not at all sure that the time isn't entirely out of joint for the so called art of painting, and I am certain that very few persons, comparatively speaking, have achieved the real experience of the eye either as spectator or performer. Modern art must of necessity remain in the state of experimental research if it is to have any significance at all. Painters must paint for their own edification and pleasure, and what they have to say, not what they are impelled to feel, is what will interest those who are interested in them. The thought of the time is the emotion of the time.

I personally am indebted to Segantini the impressionist, not Segantini the symbolist,, for what I have learned in times past of the mountain and a given way to express it just as it was Ryder who accentuated my already tormented imagination. Cubism taught me much and the principle of Pissarro, furthered by Seurat, taught me more. These with Cezanne are the great logicians of color. No one will ever paint like Cezanne for example, because no one will ever have his peculiar visual gifts; or to put it less dogmatically, will anyone ever appear again with so peculiar and almost unbelievable a faculty for dividing color sensations and making logical realizations of them? Has anyone ever placed his color more reasonably with more of a sense of time and measure than he? I think not, and he furnished for the enthusiast of today new reasons for research into the realm of color for itself.

It is not the idiosyncrasy of an artist that creates the working formula, it is the rational reasoning in him that furnishes the material to build on. Red, for example, is a color that almost any ordinary eye is familiar with but in general when an ordinary painter sees it he sees it as isolated experience with the result that his presentation of red lives its life alone, where it is placed, because it has not been modified to the tones around it and modification is as good a name as any for the true art of painting color as we think of it today. Even Cezanne was not always sure of pure red, and there are two pictures of his I think of, where something could have been done to put the single hue in its place the art for which he was otherwise so gifted. Real color is in a condition of neglect at the present time because monochrome has been the fashion for the last fifteen or twenty years even the superb colorist Matisse was for a time affected by it. Cubism is largely responsible for this because it is primarily derived from sculptural concepts and found little need for color in itself. When a group feeling is revived once again, such as held sway among the Impressionists, color will come into its logical own. And it is timely enough to see that for purposes of outdoor painting, Impressionism is in need of revival.

Yet I cannot but return to the previous theme which represents my conversion from emotional to intellectual notions; and my feeling is: of what use is a painting which does not realize its aesthetical problem? Underlying all sensible works of art, there must be somewhere in evidence the particular problems understood. It was so with those artists of the great past who had the intellectual knowledge of structure upon which to place their emotions. It is this structural beauty that makes the old painting valuable. And so it becomes to me a problem. I would rather be sure that I had placed two colors in true relationship to each other than to have exposed a wealth of emotionalism gone wrong in the name of richness of personal expression. For this reason I believe that it is more significant to keep one's painting in a condition of severe experimentalism than to become a quick success by means of cheap repetition.

The real artists have always been interested in this problem, and you feel it strongly in the work of Da Vinci, Piero della Francesca, Courbet, Pissarro, Seurat, and Cezanne. Art is not a matter of slavery to the emotion or even a matter of slavery to nature or to the aesthetic principles. It is a tempered and happy union of them all.

Marsden Hartley Images

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1914 Portrait of a German Officer
1922-23 New Mexico Recollections No. 12
1932 Carnelian Country
1934 New England Sea View - Fish House