Marsden Hartley

 
Hartley spent the summer of 1920 in Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he painted a series of still lifes featuring rubber plants. In these works he fractured all or a portion of the surface into a network of colored planes and explored the formal relationships among volume, mass, and the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. Leathery Leaves was directly inspired by Hartley's exposure to Patrick Henry Bruce's Compositions I-VI, especially Composition III (1916, Yale University Art Gallery).

Hartley follows Bruce's model of breaking up forms into a bright geometric mosaic of color patches of mostly bright red, yellow, and blue, and of applying paint thickly with a palette knife. As in Composition III, the downward zigzag thrust of Hartley's painting brings to mind similar movements in Duchamp's two versions of the Nude Descending the Staircase (1911 and 1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art).

Hartley wanted to learn from Bruce's method, and he followed that artist's practice of constructing his picture entirely in color planes of varying hue, value and tone and created a work of great intensity and vibration. A. B. Frost, Jr., James Daugherty and Jay Van Everen were among the other American artists influenced by Bruce's highly original Compositions.

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