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With its rapid brushwork and tilted perspective, this painting summons a strong sense of motion.

Hartley worked in France in the late 1920s, where he produced numerous still lifes.

The artist was a member of the Stieglitz Group of American Modernist artists.

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Marsden Hartley

Mushrooms on a Blue Background

oil on Masonite

15 x 18 in.

The Robert and Traude Hensel Collection

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Born in Lewiston, Maine, Marsden Hartley studied art at the Cleveland School of Art in Cleveland, Ohio and New York at the Chase School and the National Academy of Design.  By 1909 he had his first exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz’s New York gallery and became part of the dealer’s progressive circle of modernists that also included Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove and John Marin.  He traveled to Europe in 1912 and worked in Germany under the influence of Expressionism and in Paris where he met Gertrude Stein and was introduced to some important avant-garde artists.  He experimented with Paul Cézanne’s style of modernism and created numerous still life paintings that focused on decorative elements and structure. Hartley returned to the United States to explore American subjects, including Native American designs. The symbolism and spirituality he found in his subjects became an important part of his life and art, resulting in some of his most powerful paintings. Later in his life, Hartley spent several years in the fishing village at Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia where he did a series of portraits of the lobstermen.  He also painted several religious subjects and returned to still lifes adding seascape backgrounds. 

In the late 1920s Hartley worked in France, where he renewed his fascination with the art of Paul Cézanne.  During this period he produced many still lifes, including this unusual view of mushrooms tumbling against a blue background.  With its rapid brushwork and tilted perspective, the painting summons a strong sense of motion. 

Reference

Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser.  Marsden Hartley: American Modernist, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. ISBN-13: 978-0300097672