About this work
What greets you in *New Mexico Recollections — Storm* is pure atmospheric force: a landscape dominated by bold, sweeping forms and robust colors, with undulating hills under a heavily clouded sky rendered in swirling, dynamic brushstrokes. The composition surges upward — mountains appear almost abstract, curving and intertwining to imbue the painting with motion and energy, while dark, imposing forms contrast sharply against lighter tones of sky, enhancing the dramatic effect. The storm of the title is not incidental but structural: racing clouds, damp air, and the electric atmosphere that follows a sudden rain organize the entire canvas into a confrontation between earth and weather. A somber palette and agitated paint application drive a turbulent composition, making it unmistakable that the artist was channeling genuine emotion into the landscape.
Hartley's most profound responses to the Southwest came in the *New Mexico Recollections* series, which he painted after he returned to Berlin in the early 1920s.
He had traveled to New Mexico for the first and only time in 1918, finding the Southwest both inspiring and challenging — and even after moving away, he continued to ponder the region, producing the series from his Berlin studio. That distance was the point. *New Mexico Recollections* is a painting of the mind rather than of place, which can be readily observed in the mood, color, and execution — the scene, rendered with intense physicality, is foreboding.
Painted in Berlin circa 1922–23, the series of approximately twenty-four works is considered Hartley's first important body of work after World War I , and these paintings exude, in the words of scholar Jeanne Hokin, "a brute force and dramatic vigor heretofore not encountered in Hartley's artistic vocabulary."
These extraordinary pictures are among the most complex and multilayered depictions of the American landscape produced between the wars — when taken as a whole, the tumultuous *Recollections* depict a landscape of memory and fantasy, closer to a dreamscape than a concrete scene.
On the wall, this is a painting for rooms that can hold silence and weight — a study, a lofted living space with stone or plaster walls, anywhere that low or lateral light can animate the impasto surface. Thrumming with energy, bold forms, and strong colors, Hartley used thick, bravura brushstrokes to dramatize emphatic shapes and stark landscape contrasts. It speaks to viewers drawn to American modernism at its most uncompromising — those who want a landscape not as scenery
