Marsden Hartley Quotes

For wine, they drank the ocean – for bread, they ate their own despairs; counsel from the moon was theirs – for the foolish contention - Murder is not a pretty thing – yet seas do raucous everything to make it pretty – for the foolish or the brave, a way seas have.

The same feeling [when Hartley saw a work of the American painter w:Albert Pinkham Ryder for the very first time in his life] came over me in the given degree as came out of the Emerson’s Essays when they were first given to me I I felt as I have read a page of the Bible in both cases. All my essential Yankee qualities we re brought forth out of this picture and if I needed to be stamped an American this was the first picture that had done this – for it had in it everything that I knew and had experienced about my own New England – even though I had never lived by the sea – it had in it the stupendous solemnity of a Blake, [English religious painter] picture and it had a sense of realism besides that bore such a force of nature itself as to leave me breathless.

I don’t want to escape via intellectual ruses – I want affirmations via passionate embraces & you can’t have life unless you live it.

The essential of a real picture is that the things which occur in it occur to him in his peculiarly personal fashion.. ..the idea of modernity is but a new attachment of things universal – a fresh relationship to the courses of the sun and to the living swing of the earth – a new fire of affection for the living essence present everywhere.

Every painter must traverse for himself that distance from Paris to Aix (Aix-en-Provence where Paul Cézanne frequently painted in open air] or from Venice to Toledo [where w:El Greco lived and painted for many years]. Expression is for one knowing its own pivot. Every expressor relates solely to himself – that is the concern of the individualist.

They want Americans to be American, and yet they offer little or no spiritual sustenance for their growth and welfare [quote on the critics who push to stop his long European stay and to return]

Blake would not laugh at my fantasies if he saw them [in contrary to the public in New York, as Hartley realized well, before]

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.

..the virtue of Yankee upbringing spiritually speaking is of more downright value to me than any past heritages.

My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape.

[I was] happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method.. .. rendering the God-spirit in the mountains.

My work is getting stronger & stronger and more intense all the time.. ..I have such a rush of new energy & notions coming into my head, over my horizon like chariots of fire that all I want is freedom to step aside and execute them.

I believe until a man has given up himself he has given up nothing - all his knowledge of accepted aesthetics are of no avail until he has stepped aside from them and given up himself – himself only through the eyes of himself. What a problem everlasting then is it not? A life time of breathless endeavor to be the thing and do the thing of his being – So easy to travel along with claques and crowds, voicing vociferously the great discoveries of each – How ineffably difficult, voicing the soul of one man – alone to himself and – then to whomever else hears..

It is never difficult to see images – when the principle of the image is embedded in the soul.

I see the possibility of being 'made new' again and the gift of rebirth is all that lets anyone really live.. ..The great secret.. .. is never to get stuck, imprisoned in common social patterns. They always paralyse the real quality of life – the 'going onward' is all that matters, and the dead moments in one’s life through trying to be a unit in any society or social concept are terrifying really.