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PROPERTY FROM A NEW YORK COLLECTION
Lot 67▲
Marsden Hartley(1877-1943)Starfish 16 x 20in
18 May 2016, 14:00 EDT
New YorkUS$200,000 - US$300,000
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Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)
Starfish
oil on canvas
16 x 20in
Painted circa 1938.
oil on canvas
16 x 20in
Painted circa 1938.
Footnotes
Provenance
The artist.
Estate of the above, no. 243.
Babcock Galleries, New York, 1958.
Private collection, acquired from the above, circa 1959.
Sale, Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc., New York, February 20, 1963, lot 40.
Babcock Galleries, New York, acquired from the above.
Private collection, New York, acquired from the above, circa 1963.
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 2008.
Exhibited
New York, Babcock Galleries, Marsden Hartley: 1877-1943, December 8, 1958-January 3, 1959, no. 17.
New York, Babcock Galleries, Hartley 1877-1943: Exhibition of Paintings, January 4-30, 1960, no. 21.
New York, The American Federation of Arts, Late Works of Marsden Hartley, October 1966-October 1967, no. 20.
Southampton, New York, Tripoli Gallery, Water, August 15-September 9, 2013.
Marsden Hartley was among the finest of America's first generation of modernist artists, a cosmopolitan internationally known painter who created some of the most compelling and important American paintings of the 20th century. Yet it was only in the last decade of his life, when he returned to his native ground in the state of Maine, that his paintings take on a sense of poignant insight and intimate spiritual resolution not often present in his earlier work.
Gail Scott has noted that in Hartley's late works "what is left unsaid, the profoundly empty space behind the image, conveys as much as the actual object. Suspended in this Zen-like emptiness are small mundane objects... depicted as deceptively simple—even, at times, ungainly—directness." Starfish is a cogent example of a sublime and poignant Hartley image in which isolation and beauty are equated.
During the last five years of Hartley's life, he produced a remarkable group of approximately seventy finished still life paintings. These works tend to measure from approximately 8 x 16 inches to 22 x 28 inches. Sea gulls, ducks, mackerel, cod, seahorses, shells and other marine life fill his compositions – images rife with associations of isolation and longing, the passage of time and introspection about his own life. Most paintings have that "ungainly directness." However, Starfish is one of the few late pictures which break through that ungainliness and manifest a visual elegance and technical painterly fluency encountered only in Hartley at his best. Starfish is notable for its fluent brushwork, simplicity of design and its powerfully direct poetic introspection.
This work has been requested for inclusion in the traveling exhibition Nature and Spirit: Marsden Hartley's Mysticism, on view at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Forth Worth, Texas, February 4-April 22, 2017, and The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., May 27-September 4, 2017.