Lot Essay
Black and White Decoys is a profoundly spiritual and lyrical composition that is emblematic of Marsden Hartley’s most successful late works. While Hartley painted still-life subjects throughout his career, the series of paintings he completed in the 1940s during his final summers in Corea, Maine, are among his most powerful and poignant. Both immediately visceral and symbolically elusive, the present work is a superlative example from this period of which Barbara Haskell writes, “Hartley was now producing work whose level of richness and achievement equaled if not exceeded that of his German military paintings.” (Marsden Hartley, New York, 1980, p. 123)
As in other paintings from this series, in Black and White Decoys Hartley isolates his still-life subject against a richly-hued, monochromatic background. Here, the deep grey surroundings suggest a misty seascape while still maintaining an ethereal sense of isolation. As Hartley scholar Gail Scott describes, “color is minimal but so concentrated and rich in tonality that the image emerges like a secret treasure from the depths of a dark pool.” (Marsden Hartley, New York, 1988, p. 144) The composition is also closely cropped, with a high horizon line and the tails of the duck decoys truncated by the left and right edges. This modernist play with perspective, coupled with the dramatic monochromatic palette, belies Hartley's interest in the medium of photography during this period of his career.
At the same time, Hartley also references the classic folk art tradition. The subjects themselves, painted wooden duck decoys and a metal horseshoe, epitomize historic American craftsmanship, particularly of the New England coast. Hartley paints the forms with a conscious primitivism, reducing the shapes to their fundamental elements and bold, contrasting tones. Adding visibly detailed, gestural brushwork, the hand of the artist is underscored. Karen Wilkinson writes of these late still lifes, "Each of these paintings is simply an intense study of an individual object, rendered in such detail and with such tactile sophistication that the work has a potent, almost iconic immediacy." (Marsden Hartley, New Haven, Connecticut, 2002, p. 325)
The subject of Black and White Decoys further suggests a tradition in still-life painting of the bird as a memento mori symbol. Hartley was particularly inspired by fellow Maine painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, painting a portrait from memory of Ryder in 1938, which is now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hartley’s intimate and direct paintings of birds, shells and sea creatures are reminiscent of earlier sources, including Ryder's The Dead Bird (circa late 1870s, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.). Adding the element of the horseshoe—a traditional symbol of good luck—the painting balances this reminder of mortality with a spirit of hope.
In the later years of his career, Hartley became more reflective and poetic than ever before, and he considered works such as Black and White Decoys as “portraits, rather than conventional still lifes.” (Marsden Hartley, p. 143) His actual figural portraits, including that of Ryder, take on a similar compositional style of elegant simplicity and rich color contrasts as his still-life and animal arrangements. More specifically, Elizabeth Finch writes of a closely related painting in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: “Hartley’s regal Black Duck No. 2…suggests an elegiac self-portrait, underscored by the beaky profile.” (Marsden Hartley’s Maine, p. 74) Evaluating his life at the end of a long career, Hartley’s seemingly spare still-life paintings hold layers of personal meaning and psychological exploration.
Scott summarizes, “Hartley's final work is the painting of essential reality, in which what is left unsaid, the profoundly empty space behind the image conveys as much as the actual subject. Suspended in this Zen-like emptiness are small mundane objects...depicted with a deceptively simple—even, at times, ungainly directness. But underneath this American backwoods naiveté was the authority of an artist who had used the European modernist tradition to escape provincialism, and then, with astonishing independence, gone on to become, in the words of one critic, 'one of the few Americans of his generation to stand whole and free, at once the undeniable citizen of the world and his own imagination.'" (Marsden Hartley, 1988, pp. 144-45) Indeed, in its powerful, evocative simplicity and wholly unique and highly personal aesthetic, Black and White Decoys can be seen as the culmination of Hartley's tumultuous and seminal career.
As in other paintings from this series, in Black and White Decoys Hartley isolates his still-life subject against a richly-hued, monochromatic background. Here, the deep grey surroundings suggest a misty seascape while still maintaining an ethereal sense of isolation. As Hartley scholar Gail Scott describes, “color is minimal but so concentrated and rich in tonality that the image emerges like a secret treasure from the depths of a dark pool.” (Marsden Hartley, New York, 1988, p. 144) The composition is also closely cropped, with a high horizon line and the tails of the duck decoys truncated by the left and right edges. This modernist play with perspective, coupled with the dramatic monochromatic palette, belies Hartley's interest in the medium of photography during this period of his career.
At the same time, Hartley also references the classic folk art tradition. The subjects themselves, painted wooden duck decoys and a metal horseshoe, epitomize historic American craftsmanship, particularly of the New England coast. Hartley paints the forms with a conscious primitivism, reducing the shapes to their fundamental elements and bold, contrasting tones. Adding visibly detailed, gestural brushwork, the hand of the artist is underscored. Karen Wilkinson writes of these late still lifes, "Each of these paintings is simply an intense study of an individual object, rendered in such detail and with such tactile sophistication that the work has a potent, almost iconic immediacy." (Marsden Hartley, New Haven, Connecticut, 2002, p. 325)
The subject of Black and White Decoys further suggests a tradition in still-life painting of the bird as a memento mori symbol. Hartley was particularly inspired by fellow Maine painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, painting a portrait from memory of Ryder in 1938, which is now in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Hartley’s intimate and direct paintings of birds, shells and sea creatures are reminiscent of earlier sources, including Ryder's The Dead Bird (circa late 1870s, The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.). Adding the element of the horseshoe—a traditional symbol of good luck—the painting balances this reminder of mortality with a spirit of hope.
In the later years of his career, Hartley became more reflective and poetic than ever before, and he considered works such as Black and White Decoys as “portraits, rather than conventional still lifes.” (Marsden Hartley, p. 143) His actual figural portraits, including that of Ryder, take on a similar compositional style of elegant simplicity and rich color contrasts as his still-life and animal arrangements. More specifically, Elizabeth Finch writes of a closely related painting in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: “Hartley’s regal Black Duck No. 2…suggests an elegiac self-portrait, underscored by the beaky profile.” (Marsden Hartley’s Maine, p. 74) Evaluating his life at the end of a long career, Hartley’s seemingly spare still-life paintings hold layers of personal meaning and psychological exploration.
Scott summarizes, “Hartley's final work is the painting of essential reality, in which what is left unsaid, the profoundly empty space behind the image conveys as much as the actual subject. Suspended in this Zen-like emptiness are small mundane objects...depicted with a deceptively simple—even, at times, ungainly directness. But underneath this American backwoods naiveté was the authority of an artist who had used the European modernist tradition to escape provincialism, and then, with astonishing independence, gone on to become, in the words of one critic, 'one of the few Americans of his generation to stand whole and free, at once the undeniable citizen of the world and his own imagination.'" (Marsden Hartley, 1988, pp. 144-45) Indeed, in its powerful, evocative simplicity and wholly unique and highly personal aesthetic, Black and White Decoys can be seen as the culmination of Hartley's tumultuous and seminal career.