Marsden Hartley

"I learned this bit of wisdom from a principle of William Blake's which I discovered early and followed far too assiduously the first half of my aesthetic life, and from which I have happily released m…"

"I have always said that you do not see a thing until you look away from it. In other words, an object or a fact in nature has not become itself until it has been projected in the realm of the imaginat…"

"I am not a 'book of the month' artist, and I do not paint pretty pictures; but when I am no longer here my name will register forever in the history of American art."

"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 o…"

"The essential of a real picture is that the things which occur in it occur to him in his peculiarly personal fashion.. ..the idea of modernity is but a new attachment of things universal – a fresh rel…"

"the place is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last formed one spot where she can live for herself alone.. .. looked like a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge – essentially …"

".. a depth of understanding and insight into the inwardness of things.. ..doing very exceptional things of a most abstract psychic nature.."

"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 nee…"