Marsden Hartley Quotes

#1. The reading of tourist prospectuses is one of the joys of the world
it is like operetta in prose
all so flowery and heavenlike.

Marsden Hartley

#2. My work has the abstraction underneath it all now & what I deliberately set out to do down here, for this is the perfect realistic abstraction in landscape.

Marsden Hartley

#3. I harp always on the 'idea' of life as I dwell perpetually on the existence of the moment.

Marsden Hartley

#4. The virtue of Yankee upbringing spiritually speaking is of more downright value to me than any past heritages.

Marsden Hartley

#5. I could never be French, I could never become German - I shall always remain American - the essence which is in me is American mysticism just as Davies declared it when he saw those first landscapes.

Marsden Hartley

#6. A reaction, to be pleasant, must be simple.

Marsden Hartley

#7. I have achieved the 'sacred' pilgrimage to Ktaadn MT - exceeding all my expectations so far that I am sort of helpless with words. I feel as if I have seen God for the first time, and find him so nonchalantly solemn.

Marsden Hartley

#8. (I was) happily contended to be climbing the heights and the clouds by the brush method ... rendering the God-spirit in the mountains.

Marsden Hartley

#9. By getting as close to the true idea of religion, of spirituality as it is possible for us to get ... we would be in possession of the only tangible relationship tot the deity in things.

Marsden Hartley

#10. They are the gateway for our modern esthetic development, the prophets of the new time. They are most of all, the primitives of the way they have begun; they have voiced most of all the imperative need of essential personalism, of direct expression of direct experience.

Marsden Hartley

#11. The sense of form in New Mexico is for me one of the profoundest, most original, and most beautiful I have personally experienced. It must be 'learned.' . . . It is not a country of light on things. It is a country of things in light.

Marsden Hartley

#12. My work is getting stronger & stronger and more intense all the time ... I have such a rush of new energy & notions coming into my head, over my horizon like chariots of fire that all I want is freedom to step aside and execute them.

Marsden Hartley

#13. My work embodies little visions of the great intangible ... Some will say he's gone mad - others will look and say he's looked in at the lattices of Heaven and come back with the madness of splendor on him.

Marsden Hartley