Early 20th century Modernist painter Marsden Hartley explores the physicality of the fig tree during his off and on stay in the mid-1920s in Aix in southern France. He was surrounded by the landscape and vegetation that inspired artist Cezanne, an early pioneer of Modernism who employed a distinct sculptural dimension in his paintings. Hartley adopted the French painter’s “way of seeing,” Through a series of drawings and paintings, his “unfocused, artistic meanderings,” resulted in representations of objects through a new abstract vocabulary. Hartley called it ” the beauty as it is seen to exist in the real, in the object itself.”
Fig Tree, an oil on canvas, realizes the singular fig tree against a deep, dark sky. The snaking branches are formed through patches of color, a technique pioneered by Cezanne. Here “Hartley allows the architecture of the layered paint to convey the volume of the tree.” The surrounding landscape is expressive through broken brushstrokes, and vivid colors; a contrast to the bareness of the tree and its dancing branches, its sheath of hues; neutral beige, browns and blacks mesmerize, and absorb my attention. I am so riveted by this work, Hartley’s modernist style transports me atop the swaying branches, into an other worldliness, above the earth.