Marsden Hartley Quotes

34 Sourced Quotes

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

Marsden Hartley
They [The Mason family where Hartley stayed 1935 - 1941] maintain an enviable balance between the material & spiritual worlds (so) they symbolize for me the term ideal.

Marsden Hartley
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.

Marsden Hartley
I learned this bit of wisdom from a principle of William Blake's which I discovered early and followed far too assiduously the first half of my aesthetic life, and from which I have happily released myself and this axiom was: "Put off intellect and put on imagination; the imagination is the man." From this doctrinal assertion evolved the theoretical axiom that you don't see a thing until you look away from it which was an excellent truism as long as the principles of the imaginative life were believed in and followed. I no longer believe in the imagination.

Marsden Hartley
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.

Marsden Hartley
Every painter must traverse for himself that distance from Paris to Aix [where Paul Cézanne frequently painted in open air] or from Venice to Toledo [where 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.

Marsden Hartley
I have made the complete return [from imagination] to nature, and nature is, as we all know, primarily an intellectual idea. I am satisfied that painting also is like nature, an intellectual idea, and that the laws of nature as presented to the mind through the eye and the eye is the painter's first and last vehicle are the means of transport to the real mode of thought: the only legitimate source of aesthetic experience for the intelligent painter.

Marsden Hartley
As soon as a real artist finds out what art is, the more is he likely to feel the need of keeping silent about it, and about himself in connection with it. There is almost, these days, a kind of petit scandale in the thought of allying oneself with anything of a professional nature. And it is at this point that I shrink a little from asserting myself with regard to professional aspects of art. And here the quality of confession must break through.

Marsden Hartley
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..

Marsden Hartley
They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun; they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression of direct experience.

Marsden Hartley
I harp always on the 'idea' of life as I dwell perpetually on the existence of the moment.

Marsden Hartley
I could never be French, I could never become German – I shall always remain American – the essence which is in me is American mysticism just as Davies declared it when he saw those first landscapes.

Marsden Hartley
The place [Dogtown, in Gloucester, Massachusetts] is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last formed one spot where she can live for herself alone....[it] looked like a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge – essentially druidic in it appearance, it gives the feeling that an ancient race might turn up at any moment and renew an ageless rite there.

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

Marsden Hartley
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.

Marsden Hartley
The reading of tourist prospectuses is one of the joys of the world -- it is like operetta in prose -- all so flowery and heavenlike.

Marsden Hartley
All things that are living are expression and therefore part of the inherent symbology of life. Art, therefore, that is encumbered with excessive symbolism is extraneous, and from my point of view, useless art. Anyone who understands life needs no handbook of poetry or philosophy to tell him what it is.

Marsden Hartley
I have always said that you do not see a thing until you look away from it. In other words, an object or a fact in nature has not become itself until it has been projected in the realm of the imagination. Therefore what has been retained in the mind's eye is what lives. I have seldom or never worked from nature for this reason and so what I see is what I believe to be true, and that becomes the truism of the creative artist.

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

Marsden Hartley
.. by getting as close to the true idea of religion, of spirituality as it is possible for us to get.... we would be in possession of the only tangible relationship tot the deity in things.

Marsden Hartley
I have achieved the 'sacred' pilgrimage to Ktaadn MT – exceeding all my expectations so far that I am sort of helpless with words. I feel as if I have seen God for the first time, and find him so nonchalantly solemn.

Marsden Hartley
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.

Marsden Hartley
..[Picasso had] a depth of understanding and insight into the inwardness of things.... doing very exceptional things of a most abstract psychic nature..

Marsden Hartley
I am not a 'book of the month' artist, and I do not paint pretty pictures; but when I am no longer here my name will register forever in the history of American art.

Marsden Hartley
These people [the Mason-family in Nova Scotia] have that sort of incandescence, which is peculiar to those who know the meaning of simplicity & humility. They are illumined from within makes them essentially mystical in their sense of life.

Marsden Hartley