New Acquisition: Marsden Hartley

Detroit Institute of Arts

Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), Boat Abstraction, 1916. Oil on Beaver board, 20 x 15 7⁄8 in. Detroit Institute of Arts, Museum Purchase, with funds from the Robert H. Tannahill Foundation Fund, in honor of Joseph L. Hudson, Jr., partial gift of the Leah and Richard Waitzer Foundation.

The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) recently announced its acquisition of Boat Abstraction by the famed American modernist Marsden Hartley (1877-1943). The museum notes that this piece in particular, created in 1916, stands out as one of the artist’s most powerful works from a series of abstract paintings he completed while living in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

“Boat Abstraction expresses not just the movement of a sailboat, but Hartley’s sense of the evanescence of experience—the unending movement of the future into the present and the present into the past,” says Kenneth Myers, curator of American art at DIA. In the series of around 20 paintings of sailboats, it’s the only one in which Hartley uses a distinct palette that the artist had developed while living in Germany from 1914 to 1915.

“The blackness of the [backdrop] sets off the colored shapes of the boat and its sails, suggesting the impermanence, both of things in the world, and of the consciousness that perceives them,” Meyers expresses.

Boat Abstraction was created early in Hartley’s career, during a time where he moved quite frequently within the United States, following his time living abroad in both Paris and Germany. In those early years, he became friendly with some of the greats such as Alfred Stieglitz, Henri Matisse, Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso; all greatly influencing his work and vision as a modernist, abstract painter. Following World War I, Hartley was known to create a series of war motifs, where symbol began to influence his subjects.

The DIA notes that after 1917, the artist moved away from abstract and later in his career, focused on more figurative work. The museum also has two additional paintings from the end of his career; Log Jam, Penobscot Bay (1940-41) and Black Duck No. 1 (1941), but they are more than happy to include yet another significant, historical piece to their Hartley collection.

The museum states, “[We] long hoped to acquire an important early abstraction by Hartley, and Boat Abstraction is a great one.” —