Marsden Hartley, City Point, Vinahaven, 1937-38, Oil on board, 18 x 24 in
“In the art of the ordinary there is the sense of devotion.” Marsden Hartley, from a 1914 catalog introduction to his show at Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery in New York.
When Marsden Hartley painted ‘City Point, Vinalhaven,’ he was a well-known, mature artist. He was also living precariously and at times trading paintings for groceries and lodging. He had traveled in Europe and America, written extensively on art, shown in the leading avant-garde galleries, and had known everyone who mattered in modernist art, yet his reputation couldn’t sustain him. But he labored on, knowing that he sought something very important
It is difficult to write about what matters the most in Hartley’s paintings. His formal concerns aren’t relevant, nor is his style. Even his iconography, while it illuminates his personal life, doesn’t speak to the artistic veracity of his work.
Perhaps the most important piece of his art education was the Cézannes he saw in Paris. Hartley knew what Cézanne was about, and set about all his life to achieve the same kind of personal truth that Cézanne achieved. He was successful enough in that ambition that today his best works ring with a crystalline authenticity that is unmistakable.
Cézanne had changed everything, and Hartley knew this immediately. The painting became about the artist, not about the subject. The subject and its rendering were, and are, the framework through which the artist can achieve veracity of experience, a poetic truth that transcends the medium and its documentary function.
Traipsing around Maine looking for subjects in the late 1930’s Hartley was back in his home state, a very mixed and emotionally trying place for him. He had recently lost close friends in the Mason brothers, fisherman who had died at sea. He was bereft, driven, and needed to find his way in his work. He needed something ordinary.
What better place than the coast of Maine, a place where painters had come for generations, and where everyday life was lived with a deep and direct relationship with land and sea, and where he was, as much as he was anywhere, at home. He chose, among other places, City Point on the island of Vinalhaven in Penobscot Bay.
The painting is divided in half diagonally, with the right half filled with the foreground rocks and trees, and the left half by the sea, a headland in the middle distance, mountains (probably the Camden hills)and sky above, filling the top.
Hartley worked the reddish-brown Vinalhaven stones into muscular cascades that pour down from right to left, using deep black lines of shade that bring the whole mass into dominant presence near the viewer. These rocks are solidly present and close up, almost in your lap.
His shadow outlines spread from one rock onto the edge of the one beside it, and are set against suggestions of white highlights. The effect is not unlike musculature, or the fingers on a hand. He anchored the tumbling rocks with a dark shape in the lower left corner. Their apparent mass makes this small painting loom, as if it were much larger than it is.
The small area of sea is built up with layers of short, choppy strokes that build a calligraphy of ocean texture. A dark stripe of land in the middle distance creates a border between the rough sea and the smoothly rendered sky and clouds above.
Every square inch of the painting shows deliberate action. Hartley’s tools were his painter’s language and his almost visceral awareness of the shoreline stones. He was in a location that is deeply attractive and yet tinged with hazard, and he had his artist’s task, which was to set about telling the truth.
For Hartley, at that point in his life, that meant to work and rework the masses, the shading, the local color, the darks and lights and lines and suggestions until they became a universe all their own, one in which the rules of representation are born from the vitality of his demands on himself to make something that is real.
It is Hartley’s great strength that he understood that all experience of the real world is subjective, that there is no reality that can be comprehended outside the preconceptions we bring to looking at something. We go to the painting not to see a map of the spot, but to share his experience of being there, to see it a new way and share his ideas, his labor, hopes, pain and exultation.
No great work of art is really complete. The artist does as much as can be done and moves on, leaving viewers to complete the connection with him from their own imaginations. Hartley learned this from Cézanne and worked with it all his life. It is a measure of his high level of artistic success that one leaves “City Point, Vinalhaven” with a deep sense of his time at that spot. He allows us to really see it through his eyes and to have deep communion for a few moments with another person across the years. There isn’t much more to art than that.
Marsden Hartley’s “City Point, Vinalhaven” is in the permanent collection of the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine, a gift of the Alex Katz Foundation.