Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets — John Shaqi
Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and PoetsHartley, Marsden
History
Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets
Hartley, Marsden
Art; Literature, Modern -- History and criticism; Vaudeville
Martin will be remembered for his singularly personal touch along with
men like Fuller and Ryder. He is not as dramatic as either of these
artists, but he has greater finesse in delicate sensibility. He was, I
think, actually afraid of repetition, a characteristic very much in
vogue in his time, either conscious or unconscious, in artists like
Inness, Wyant, and Blakelock, with their so single note. There is
exceptional mysticity hovering over his hills and stretches of dune
and sky. It is not fog, or rain, or dew enveloping them. It is a
certain veiled presence in nature that he sees and brings forward. His
picture of peaks of the White Mountains, Jefferson and Madison, gives
you no suggestion of the "Hudson River" emptiness. He was searching
for profounder realities. He wanted the personality of his places, and
he was successful, for all of his pictures I have seen display the
magnetic touch. He "touched it off" vividly in all of them. They
reveal their ideas poetically and esthetically and the method is
personal and ample for presentation.
With George Fuller it was vastly different. He seemed always to be
halting in the shadow. You are conscious of a deep and ever so earnest
nature in his pictures. He impressed himself on his canvases in spite
of his so faulty expression. He had an understanding of depth but
surface was strange to him. He garbled his sentences so to speak with
excessive and useless wording. "The Octoroon" shows a fine feeling for
romance as do all of the other pictures of Fuller that have been
publicly visible, but it is romance obsessed with monotone. There is
the evidence of extreme reticence and moodiness in Fuller always. I
know little of him save that I believe he experienced a severity of
domestic problems. Farmer I think he was, and painted at off hours all
his life. It is the poetry of a quiet, almost sombre order, walking in
the shadow on the edge, of a wood being almost too much of an
appearance for him in the light of a busy world.
Why is it I think of Hawthorne when I think of Fuller? Is there a
relationship here, or is it only a similarity of eeriness in temper? I
would suspect Fuller of having painted a Hester Prynne excepting that
he could never have come to so much red in one place in his pictures.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account