Spanierman Gallery | An American Art Blog

Allen Tucker, "Mountain Landscape," oil on canvas, 30 x 25 inches

Lisa N. Peters

Several recent visitors to the gallery have pointed out the similarity between a number of the mountain paintings Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) created in Maine in 1906-9 and mountain paintings by Allen Tucker (1866-1939) in our current exhibition, including Mountain Landscape and Mt. Desert Island, Maine.  Neither work by Tucker is dated but they reflect some of the same sources and interests as Hartley’s.

Allen Tucker, "Mt. Desert Island, Maine," oil on canvas, 25 x 30 inches

At the beginning of their careers, both artists held a deep admiration for the work of John Twachtman (1853-1902), with whom Tucker studied, and from whose example Hartley developed his early manner.  Hartley’s style changed significantly during his summers in Maine (1906-9).  Among the factors in his new aesthetic was his interest in the mountain imagery of the Italian Divisionist painter Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899), which Hartley had seen reproduced in a 1903 edition of the magazine Jugend.  Hartley stated that Segantini had shown him “how to begin painting my own Maine mountains.”  Hartley did not closely follow Segantini’s subject matter, which usually included figures, but he adopted an approach like Segantini’s in which he painted with tiny stitch-like strokes that he overlaid vigorously to create a woven tapestry effect.  Describing the impact of Segantini on Hartley in her monograph of 1980 (Whitney Museum of American Art), Barbara Haskell wrote: “Hartley introduced into these Neo-Impressionist works the cloud and mountain motifs which were to remain central to his imagery throughout his career.  His clouds are not atmospheric mists, but distinct forms, hovering like weighty, sculptural masses over mountains which, in these 1908-9 paintings, fill the entire canvas with an almost claustrophobic closeness. . . . His mountains were equally weighty presences whose monumentality he seemed to identify with, perhaps feeling that they embodied the strength and constancy he lacked in his own life.”(17) After completing them, Hartley showed his Maine paintings to Maurice Prendergast, who provided Hartley with letters of introduction to Robert Henri and William Glackens in New York.  Glackens held a showing of Hartley’s paintings at his studio in Washington Square in 1909.

Tucker, who was close to Henri and several members of the group, may have been among those to see these works at the time—they were subsequently shown at Alfred Stieglitz’s gallery 291 in May 1909.  Yet, whether or not Tucker also was aware of Segantini or inspired by Hartley, his mountain scenes reflect his own development.  In Mountain Landscape he directly expressed the living force of the mountain through the physicality of his paint, and the uniting of foreground and background in an unbroken movement across the picture plane.  Tucker was more joyous and happier in his life than Hartley, and works such as Mountain Landscape convey a sense of his extroverted personality and his constant search for a “passionate absorption in the beauty of the world,” as was noted in 1914 by the critic Forbes Watson, who knew Allen Tucker well and was a strong supporter of his art.