Marsden Hartley (1877–1943)
Still Life with Blue Bowl, ca. 1922-23
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Oil on canvas
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21 1/4 x 25 5/8 inches
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On stretcher bar: Marsden Hartley / Hartley Berlin
Provenance
- The artist
- Adelaide Kuntz, Bronxville, New York, acquired from above
- Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, New York, acquired from above, 1944
- Sale, Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, New York, December 13, 1972, lot 126, from above
- Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, New York, acquired from above
- Mr. & Mrs. Laughlin Phillips, Georgetown, Maine, acquired from above, 1983
- Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, New York, December 1, 2004, lot 231, from above
- Mark Borghi Fine Art, New York, New York, acquired from above, 2004
- Private collection, California, acquired from above, 2005
- Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, New York, September 30, 2020, lot 14, from above
- Questroyal Fine Art, LLC, New York, New York, acquired from above, 2020
- Collection of J. Jeffrey and Ann Marie Fox
Exhibited
(Possibly) Kantstrasse, Berlin, Private Studio Exhibition of Paintings and Lithographs, Spring 1923
Exhibition of Paintings by Marsden Hartley Before 1932, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, New York, April 5–17, 1948, no. 6 (as Still Life with Fruit)
Hartley/Maurer: Contemporaneous Paintings, Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, New York, November 13–December 2, 1950, no. 4
Bertha Schaefer, Avon Old Farms, Avon, Connecticut, April 15–22, 1951
Marsden Hartley: Painter/Poet, 1877–1943, The Fisher Galleries of Art, The University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, November 20–December 20, 1968; Tucson Art Center, Tucson, Arizona, January 10–February 16, 1969; University Art Museum, University of Texas at Austin, Texas, March 10–April 27, 1969
Important Recent Acquisitions: Late 19th and Early 20th Century American Paintings, Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, New York, February 2–23, 1972, no. 26
Literature
Renee Arb, “Spotlight on: Hartley,” Art News 47 (April 1948): 33 (as Still Life with Pears).
Ben Wolf, “The Early Hartley,” Art Digest 22 (April 15, 1948): 29 (as Small Still Life with Fruit).
Exhibition of Paintings by Marsden Hartley Before 1932 (New York: Bertha Schaefer Gallery, 1948), no. 6 (as Still Life with Fruit).
Clement Greenberg, Hartley/Maurer: Contemporaneous Paintings (New York: Bertha Schaefer
Gallery, 1950), no. 4.
Charlotte Curtis, “Of Heart and Hand: Laughlin and Jennifer Phillips’s Georgetown Residence,” Architectural Digest (April 1985): 153 (as Still Life with Blue Bench).
Robert Rosenblum, “Art: Modernist Still Lifes–American Experiments with Radical European Ideas,” Architectural Digest (November 1990): 246.
Important Recent Acquisitions: Late 19th and Early 20th Century American Paintings (New York: Hirschl & Adler, 1972).
Oils, [circa 1944–1964], Box 14, Folder 31, Frame 7, Elizabeth McCausland Papers, Series 6: Marsden Hartley, 1900–1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (as Fruit Abstraction).
Research Material, 1951–1958, Box 19, Folder 15, Frame 52, Elizabeth McCausland Papers, Series 6: Marsden Hartley, 1900–1964, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.
Note
From November 1921 to October 1923, Hartley lived in Berlin; during this time he focused solely on still-life painting, frequently depicting fruit, bread, bowls, and baskets in earth tones. He considered his Berlin paintings to be “the best painting of my life as painting—not pictures thank god—but paintings.”[1]
Director of the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project, Gail Scott, claims, “Based on cubistic principles but—as so often the case with Hartley—made entirely his own, Still Life with Blue Bowl is one of the finest examples of the square format still life paintings—indeed of the entire Berlin series. In an Art News review of Hartley’s solo exhibition at Bertha Schaefer Gallery in 1948, art critic Renée Arb uses this still life (known then by the title “Still Life with Pears”) to characterize just how Hartley forged his unique expression from ‘Parisian’ influences. ‘Though influenced successively by Cézanne, the cubists, and the fauves, [his] works show a tough bluntness that European study never refined. Most Parisian, perhaps is the suave use of cubism seen in Still Life with Pears.’”[2]
This work will be included in the forthcoming project about the artist’s work by Gail R. Scott.
[1.] Bruce Weber, The Heart of the Matter: The Still Lifes of Marsden Hartley (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, 2003), 48–49.
[2] Gail R. Scott, “Marsden Hartley’s Still Life with Blue Bowl, 1922–23: Commentary by Gail R. Scott” (unpublished essay).
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A Collector’s Journey
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