MARSDEN HARTLEY, Red Flowers on Pink Ground

Charles F. Iklé
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (sold: Sotheby's, New York, September 23, 1993, lot 238, illustrated in color)
Acquired by the present owner at the above sale

From 1940 until 1943, the year of his death, Hartley spent a few months each year living in Corea, Maine, a small coastal fishing village near his dear friends Forest and Katie Young. Although he was suffering from a variety of health problems, this was professionally an immensely gratifying time for him. He had won fourth purchase prize in December 1942 in an exhibition, “Artists for Victory”, sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and in February he exhibited at the prestigious Paul Rosenberg Gallery in his first solo show which was both a great financial and critical success.

Hartley frequently chose a vibrant palette for his late still lifes and included color-saturated roses in his compositions.  Red Flowers on Pink Ground features a small bouquet of red roses clustered together, rimmed by their emerald green leaves and laid down against an undulating pink background. The rose is often depicted in the history of art as a symbol of fading love, transient beauty and mortality.  In Hartley’s Red Flowers on Pink Ground the roses seem to defy these historical interpretations as their full blooms boldly dominate the canvas, filling the composition from edge to edge, a positive affirmation of their existence. It is fitting that this work belongs to Hartley’s last group of paintings completed in 1943, the year he would finally gain the confidence and professional satisfaction that had eluded him for so long, and tragically, the final year of his life.