Still life was an important subject for Marsden Hartley throughout his career. A consummate reader, writer and deep thinker, Hartley used his subject matter –– whether it was still life, landscape, seascape or the figure –– to explore complex ideas about existence, ego, spirituality, and creativity. Hartley struggled mightily with the vicissitudes of life and more specifically of being an artist, and he returned to still life more than any other subject as calming, grounding and redemptive work.

Hartley painted Flowers of 1928-29 at a pivotal moment in his career. He was burdened by the stinging criticism he received from American art critics and a lack of sales. His four-year stay in France was coming to an end because he had run out of money. Hartley was not eager to return to the States, where he often felt hemmed in and isolated. He started painting still lifes of a collection of seashells he brought to France with him and called the works “symbols of peace” to resuscitate his “almost paralyzed hand and eye back to health.”

The art historian Meyer Shapiro points out that artists often return to still life painting during challenging moments in their careers as a means of self-discipline and concentration. In making a commitment to record the known world, they create space in their minds, much like a creative pause. He writes that although still life objects may be commonplace, in the close looking they become “a mystery, a source of metaphysical wonder, completely secular and stripped of all conventional symbolism. . . they may evoke the mystical.”

At this time in Hartley’s life he had become very interested in Christian mysticism and the philosophical work of George Santayana, particularly his book Skepticism and Animal Faith (1923). From Santayana’s philosophy, Hartley came to realize that he must turn away from an inward-facing romantic imagination –– the self and artistic ego –– and turn toward greater objectivity in his thoughts and art. Hartley no longer strove to express the idea about the thing but instead wanted to express the thing itself. He sought “to distinguish the fine edge of truth from the might of the imagination.” Still life offered no better subject to explore this idea in painted form.

In Flowers Hartley’s goal was to capture the objective clarity of the composition. He did not want to get bogged down by his imagination or his intellectuality. The objective was to get as close to the essence of the thing as possible. He did so by focusing on the pulse of energy through brilliant color and dynamic form. Still present is the strong influence of Paul Cezanne in the blockish, elemental forms of the vase and flowers themselves. But there is palpable immediacy in the brushwork and the forms of the flowers. Hartely captures a lifeforce by solely focusing on “the thing” itself: the flowers as they sit and also fall in the vase, the arrangement in space, the space itself as it recedes in depth but simultaneously pushes the arrangement to the surface. Gail Scott, the leading scholar on Hartley, states that Hartley “yearned for an art expression that flowed from the life impulse, not the mental or imaginative sources that had only a tenuous connection with life experience.” Flowers embodies Hartley’s goal: it is simultaneously rich and spare, brilliant and distinct, intricate and broad. He once said: “I want to be life and not myself . . . just a wholesome supply of magnanimous life.” The best of Hartley’s work embodies this credo, and Flowers does just that.