About this work
Painted around 1927 in oil on canvas, *Mont Sainte-Victoire, Aix-en-Provence* presents one of the great geological subjects in Western art — a limestone ridge rising above the sun-scorched plains of southern France — recast entirely in Hartley's register. The mountain consumes the canvas; there are no roads or trees, and the intervening distance has been compressed.
Bands of color suggest varying terrain and the play of light across the mountain, while a pinkish cloud extends across the top of the canvas like an arm reaching to envelop the peak.
The view and brushwork are clear homages to Paul Cézanne, but the vibrant palette, with its hot pinks and brilliant blues, is all Hartley. Where Cézanne's versions of this mountain feel analytical and measured, Hartley's is charged — the heat of Provence pressed into pigment.
In 1926, 1927, and 1929, Hartley painted in Aix-en-Provence in an artistic communion with Cézanne, an experience that bore fruit not only in his own paintings of Mont Sainte-Victoire but also, more subtly and more profoundly, in his later depictions of Maine's Mount Katahdin. This was a period of restless searching: Hartley was living as an expatriate, moving between Paris, Vence, and Provence, hungry, as he confessed to Stieglitz, for "a place to be." He created at least four other paintings of this view, and in each work he explored slightly different foregrounds, sometimes including trees or a road, and experimented with the shading on the mountain and the treatment of the sky. The series represents one of the most sustained acts of artistic dialogue in American Modernism — an American outsider wrestling openly with the founding father of modern painting, on the founding father's own ground.
This is a painting that rewards a wall with strong, direct light — a south- or west-facing room where sunlight can pick up the pinks and push the blues. It speaks to the viewer who is drawn to the crosscurrents of American and European Modernism, and to landscapes that carry weight beyond the geographical. The mood is meditative but sun-warmed, solitary without being spare. It sits with equal ease in a loft filled with mid-century furniture or a simply furnished study where one painting is asked to hold the room on its own — which, without any difficulty at all, this one does.
