Marsden Hartley (1877-1943)

This work is included in Gail R. Scott's Marsden Hartley Legacy Project. We would like to thank Gail Scott for providing the note for this lot.

Though raised in the Episcopal Church, Marsden Hartley was never an adherent of any organized religion. Nevertheless, he had a lifelong, idiosyncratic involvement with a variety of spiritual traditions, especially Christian mysticism. He read widely among the medieval mystics and lives of the saints, wrote essays and poems on spiritual and religious themes, and incorporated imagery, iconography, and implicit and explicit Christian subjects into his art. In the last three years of his life, perhaps sensing his own mortality, Hartley became absorbed in depicting the pathos and suffering of Jesus’s crucifixion in eight major paintings and many drawings, the Ebsworth Christ being a powerfully emotive example. Examples from this series in public institutions include Christ Held by Half-Naked Men (1940-41, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.) and Christ Evicted (1941-43, Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado Springs, Colorado).

As rendered by Hartley—perhaps, as has been noted, in a self-identifying way—these Christ figures are androgynous, with masculine beards and chest hair, but also feminized with long hair, sensitive, elongated facial features, and breasts. An elemental chromatic triad sets the tone of the painting: blood red in the background, lips and left nipple of the figure; inky black in the mass of head and chest hair; and ashen white skin. With expressionist mastery Hartley conveys the mystery and agony of the cross as no other American modernist dared to do.