Marsden Hartley 1877 - 1943

Jane Kendall Mason Hamilton Abell (later Gingrich), Philadelphia, by 1944
Gift to the present owner from the above, 1983

New York, Museum of Modern Art, Marsden Hartley, October 1944-January 1945, no. 263, p. 80, illustrated
New York, Berry-Hill Galleries, The Heart of the Matter: The Still-Lifes of Marsden Hartley, May-June 2003, pp. 70, 161, pl. 46, p. 98, illustrated in color
New York, Bruce Silverstein Gallery, Seven Americans: Demuth, Dove, Hartley, Marin, O'Keeffe, Stieglitz, Strand, September-October 2012, illustrated in color pl. 7

Gardner’s Gloves and Field Implements was executed between 1937 and 1938, when Marsden Hartley returned to his birthplace of Maine after a long absence. From June 1937 to January 1938, Hartley settled in Georgetown, Maine, a place he had grown familiar with during his visits to the summer home of the sculptor Gaston Lachaise and his wife Rebecca. Although Hartley had fond memories of spending time with the couple and the simple life they lived there, his move was in part motivated by a desire to repatriate himself as an American painter. After spending many years living abroad in Germany and Nova Scotia, Hartley found himself subjected to criticism that his work was not truly American in character. He was eager to tether himself physically and artistically to the land of his birth. The impulse to return home was not unique to Hartley, however, but was instead part of a broader social desire to reconnect with a pre-industrialized and urbanized America in the wake of the First World War. As many artists and intellectuals came to view the American landscape as an essential component of the American identity, this collective consciousness manifested itself aesthetically in the movement now known as Regionalism.

While not explicitly a Regionalist, Hartley was intentionally striving to evoke the character and feel of his native land during this period, thus aligning himself with many of the Regionalists’ ideals. Nevertheless, Hartley consistently retained his distinctive vision of the world, ultimately contributing to the sense of masculinity and powerful vitality that underlies the work he began to execute during this time. Despite the outward straightforwardness of its subject and composition, Gardner’s Gloves and Field Implements stands as a powerful example of Hartley’s dynamic and expressive aesthetic. Depicting an array of gardening tools and a pair of gloves, the canvas immediately evokes imagery associated with the care and maintenance of the earth. By magnifying the items so that they fill the entirety of the picture plane, however, Hartley adapts the traditional iconography of still-life to render a composition that is strikingly modern and direct. He collapses the pictorial space to press his subjects forward so that they threaten to spill out of the compositional field; indeed, one of the glove’s fingers had already extended slightly beyond the frame into the three-dimensional world occupied by the viewer. 

The vigorous brushwork and thick application of paint the artist employs to render his subjects imbues them with a commanding presence that contrasts dynamically with the formal composition of the work. Painted against a darkly atmospheric black background, the simplified motifs seem to have a life of their own, as if recently used or worn. The stark frontality, heavy contours, and opaque application of color—particularly black—present  in the canvas are stylistically consistent with his work from this period, yet also recall the work of the French master, Édouard Manet (Fig. 1), and his distinctive aesthetic interpretation of this centuries-old genre.