Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1916 (Heft 48))

At times the character of the concrete objects, used as symbols of expression, may seem
to minimize the conception; introducing a local and comparatively insignificant note into a
composition of great beauty and high imagination. I can believe that the next step in Hartley’s
evolution will be toward the symbolizing of more elemental and universal ideas. It is even now
demanded by the spiritual quality of the creativeness that he is possessed of as a composer of
form and color. His organic creations are already superior in most cases to the ideas that they
embody. I wish him an enhanced range of vision.
Willard Huntington Wright in the “Forum” {revised):
Hartley was undoubtedly inspired in the beginning of his career by one of the most artistic
men America has produced—A. P. Ryder. His first works, of which I have seen but a few,
bear something of the earlier man’s massive pattern transformed into a more modern type as
befitted a younger artist sensitive to the scintillation of color. In them also is a quality of
decorative lightness more ethereal than Ryder’s; but in addition there was evident a desire to
beautify by rich ornament; and this desire marked a gulf between the temperaments of the two
men. Later Hartley was more or less of a mystic who endeavored to transmit to the spectator,
by abstract groupings of lines and by contoural shapes and colors, the causative stimuli he has
received before nature as an experience. In other words, he tried to translate into abstract
terms, which serve as symbols, his emotions before concrete nature. Like Kandinsky in paint
and Maeterlinck in literature, Hartley sensed the profound affinities between objective stimuli
and their all but sub-conscious reactions, and he sought, by cultivating a hypersensitivity, to
transmit these parallels to the highly motor individual. His latest work, however, unfortunately
not available for the Forum exhibition, being delayed in transit from Berlin, show a decided
advance, both as to color-vision and point of view. There is no literary symbolism here.
The promise of something relatively decisive, which I remarked in his earlier works, has been
fulfilled. He has set down, directly and sensitively, his optical impressions—not in the purely
illustrative sense, but in the deeper aesthetic sense. For this organized method of vision
Hartley uses the word “pictural,” in distinction to “pictorial,” and calls his canvases “consulta-
tions of the eye”: for although there are recognizable objects in his work, these objects are viewed
through an aesthetic consciousness which permits of the retention of their character, but at
the same time moulds them to the needs of the picture’s form, producing a kind of harmonic
and simultaneous vision, as if one had looked at nature through a glass which arranged, balanced,
and properly toned the normal vision—in short, which made aesthetically “pictural” a common
pictorial view. Hartley’s color is exquisitely sensitive; and his effects, while being artistic and
ordered, are yet free from obvious struggling with problems. His pictures beautify life in the
highest aesthetic sense.
Robert J. Cole in the “N. Y. Evening Sun”:
Marsden Hartley affirms that there is “no hidden symbolism whatsoever” in his pictures
at 291 Fifth Avenue. They are “things under observation, just pictures of any day, any hour.
I have expressed only what I have seen. They are merely consultations of the eye—in no sense
problems.” It might perhaps be said that, however he felt about it, he has left a problem or two
for spectators to solve. But the better way is to enjoy the good color combinations of flags and
checker boards, with here and there a lusty trout and here and there a grayling, as in Tennyson’s
“Brook.” For Mr. Hartley loves fish and waves undisturbed by submarines. Even in the
soldier pieces we get no effect of the strife and destruction of battle. In this time of modern
warfare the very modern artist has gone back to the glory of chivalry—trappings and heraldry.
That is it—heraldry. A number of these compositions resolve themselves into designs for coats
of arms. The present war is a legacy of the Middle Ages. But hold! Here we are doing just
what Mr. Hartley expressly forbade, going back of the facts he “observed casually.”

Henry Tyrrell in the “Christian Science Monitor” (Boston):
“Never since the tower of Babel has there been such general chaos of utterance and con-
fusion of understanding as prevails in the art world today,” was the declaration lately made to
the correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor by Alfred Stieglitz, whose unique gallery of
the Photo-Secession, 291 Fifth Avenue, is a sort of sanctuary or no-man’s-land that offers a
temporary resting place to any and every strange new thing that comes along.

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