Brooklyn Museum √

Brooklyn Museum  - add to "Done" list.

I arrived in NYC on Saturday and had all day Sunday to do whatever I wanted.  No question about it - Brooklyn Museum.  So I hopped on the 1 Train at 116th and made my way to Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Museum 

The Museum came into view immediately as I reached the top steps leading out from the subway.  It was striking - an incredibly beautiful building.  Awesome, really.  I stopped in my tracks and just said, oh, my . . .", when someone behind me responded, "uh, excuse me, huh?"  Oh right, you don't just stop - on subway stairs . . . in New York . . .  oops.  I took a picture after I let the people get by me.  

I made a plan to focus on mid-19th to mid-20th C. European and American paintings.  Otherwise, trying to see it all is way too overwhelming and I end up feeling defeated.  So, I've learned to pace myself at museums.  (I did so well pacing myself here that after a break in the cafe I treated myself to some Italian Renaissance paintings.)  My plan worked well for the amount of time I had.  I was able to really look and notice and engage, and even do "little inside dances" (see post Up Close and Personal, 6/11/13) when I came upon a "famous" painting, like Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom, c1833-34. 

Marsden Hartley

Evening Storm, Schoodic, Maine No. 2

1942

So, anyway, I was excited to see Marsden Hartley paintings at the museum.  Hartley (1877-1943) was an American Modernist painter who lived and worked in Europe, the American southwest, and New York City, though he was born in Lewiston, Maine, summered in Maine, and painted exclusively in Maine in the last years of his life.  His influences were Cezanne, Matisse, and Picasso, artists he became familiar with during his days of studying and running in New York avant-garde circles; although it was the people and the rugged coast and mountains of Maine that inspired him to create some of his most powerful landscape and figure paintings.

Marsden Hartley

Ghosts of the Forest

1938

"The idea of modernity is but a new attachment of things universal - a fresh relationship to the courses of the sun and to the living swing of the earth - a new fire of affection for the living essence present everywhere." (Marsden Hartley, statement for catalogue of 1914 exhibition)

Marsden Hartley

Gull

1942-1943

The painting below, "Fox Island", is not at the Brooklyn Museum; as a matter of fact it's presently at the Portland Museum of Art.  But I had to include it here because it is so essentially Maine for me.  

Marsden Hartley

Jotham's Island (now Fox), Off Indian Point, Georgetown, Maine

1937