About
Works from this series by Marsden Hartley are an exercise in memory. Hartley completed this painting from his Berlin studio, where the American painter produced several remembrances of his time in the jagged, arid New Mexico landscape. In one of his essays on New Mexico, Hartley described the Southwest as “essentially a sculptural country.” In Recollection #12, Hartley carved the barren topography into undulating waves of deep brown mountains, kicking up rolling gray clouds and woody green sagebrush. The landscape is highly stylized, influenced in part by his exposure to German Expressionism in Berlin in the years following World War I.