Maine Woods

1908

Marsden Hartley

Painter, American, 1877 - 1943

Vibrant strokes of cranberry red, cobalt blue, butterscotch yellow, emerald green, tan, and parchment white create a view of densely spaced trees in this abstracted, nearly square painting. Thin, vertical tree trunks span the height of the composition, and are irregularly marked with horizontal strokes of topaz blue, earth brown, shell pink, or scarlet red. The spaces between the trunks are filled in almost entirely with diagonal, vertical, and a few horizontal strokes to suggest a dense canopy. Rows of short, vertical strokes in royal blue or violet purple create two diagonal bands across the top third of the painting. A break in the forest at the bottom center opens onto two small rectangles topped with strokes of lapis blue, perhaps representing houses in the distance.
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Maine Woods represents a dense forest interior that emphasizes the verticality of the white birch trees pressed up against the picture plane. A snow-covered mountain is barely distinguishable at the upper right. Marsden Hartley adopted the Italian divisionist artist Giovanni Segantini’s “stitch” brushstroke, which he used to build up an image out of short, interlocking lines of pure color. He applied the pigment thickly and spontaneously, giving the painting a highly expressive character.

In the fall of 1908, Hartley moved to Maine and settled on a farm in Stoneham Valley near North Lovell, where he remained until March 1909. Working in isolation and enduring the severe winter conditions, he produced a large number of paintings, including Maine Woods, in his fully developed neo-impressionist style. The innovative, expressive, and spiritual quality of such works impressed Alfred Stieglitz—photographer and avant-garde art impresario—who arranged a solo exhibition for Hartley at his 291 gallery in New York in 1909. Although the show received mixed reviews and was a financial failure, it helped establish Hartley as a leading member of the American avant-garde.

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Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on canvas

  • Credit Line

    Gift of Bernard Brookman

  • Dimensions

    overall: 74.9 x 74.9 cm (29 1/2 x 29 1/2 in.)
    framed: 82.5 x 82.5 x 5.3 cm (32 1/2 x 32 1/2 x 2 1/16 in.)

  • Accession

    1991.71.1

More About this Artwork

Scholarly Article:  American Paintings, 1900–1945: Maine Woods, 1908

This nearly square painting shows an industrial area with buildings, storage silos, a smokestack, and railroad tracks. A mound of brown dirt or other material is in shadow in the lower left corner of the painting. Next to the mound, railroad tracks extend diagonally from the lower center of the painting into the distance to our right. The tracks end at a white building with staggered gray rooflines to our right in the distance. A tall terracotta-red smokestack rises high beyond the white building, smoke pouring out of its top and blending into the clouds above. Just beyond the mound of dirt, piles of white material, perhaps in unseen bins, line the railroad track to our left and lead back to a row ten interconnected, coral-orange silos. The horizon comes about halfway up the painting, and it is lined with a row of long white and gray warehouses. The artist signed and dated the work with brown paint in the lower right corner: “Sheeler 31.”

Scholarly Series:  American Paintings, 1900–1945

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Purchased c. 1912/1914 by Harrie T. Lindeberg [1879-1959] for Herman S. Brookman [1891-1973], New York, and Portland, Oregon;[1] by inheritance to his son, Bernard Brookman [1912-2001], Watsonville, California; gift 1991 to NGA.
[1] Herman Brookman was a New York City architect who worked as a draftsman and designer for Harrie T. Lindeberg from 1909 until 1923, when he moved to Portland, Oregon, to start his own firm. One day, Lindeberg took Brookman to lunch and then to an exhibition of Hartley's work, where he offered to buy his employee any painting in the gallery. Brookman chose Maine Woods, and it remained in his family until 1991. The date of the purchase is unknown; Bernard Brookman suggested it might have occurred in 1920, when his father temporarily left Lindeberg's employ to study in Europe, while Philip Brookman, Bernard's son, suggested it was around 1912/1914. Herman Brookman specialized in residential architecture and designed the M. Lloyd Frank estate, now Lewis and Clark College, as well as the Temple Beth Israel and the Memorial Temple House in the Portland area. The provenance has been reconstructed through letters from Bernard Brookman, 2 February 1990, and his son Philip Brookman, 28 September 1989, both to NGA curator Nan Rosenthal, in NGA curatorial files. See also https://digital.lib.washington.edu/architect/architects/2221/.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1909

  • Probably Exhibition of Paintings in Oil by Mr. Marsden Hartley, of Maine, 291 Gallery, New York, 1909, probably one of the Songs of Autumn.

1974

  • Loan to display with permanent collection, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1974-before 1989.

2017

  • Marsden Hartley's Maine, The Met Breuer, New York; Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, 2017, no. 40, repro.

Inscriptions

top center reverse: Marsden / Hartley

Wikidata ID

Q20191161

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