Yesterday I had the pleasure of visiting the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, which is now exhibiting a rather large collection of works from Marsden Hartley. The exhibit is titled: Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism.
The Museum itself is fantastic! It is quite a bit smaller than I had expected, but the space is very open and inviting. The collections of O’Keefe’s work is exquisite; from the well known to the rare, the museum has watercolors from the mid 1910’s which seem mere studies of color and form, and excellent examples of her later work including many of her famous Calla Lily, Jimson, and other flower paintings and of course her remarkable New Mexico Landscapes.
As for the collection of Marsden Hartley, I was not at all inspired. I found him very interesting, but I could not appreciate his interpretation of the form of landscapes, and often found his colors to be severe. Unlike O’Keefe, who is one of the few artists who can successfully combine pinks and greys, Hartley fails in my view to make color an asset. There was one of his works in the exhibit which I did find quite interesting: a Pastel on Paper titled Pueblo Mountain, NM 1918 (shown below).
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The real find, however, was a small collection of 30 prints from the permanent collection of the museum by the Ecuadorean artist Galo Galecio entitled
