Artwork
Landscape No. 3, Cash Entry Mines, New Mexico
Landscape No. 3, Cash Entry Mines, New Mexico is an oil painting by the American Impressionist artist Marsden Hartley. It dates from 1920 and is held in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Landscape No.
- Accession no.
- 65937
- Credit line
- Alfred Stieglitz Collection
About this work
Overview
Though titled after a mining site, the work omits industrial elements entirely, focusing instead on the surrounding terrain.
Landscape No. 3, Cash Entry Mines, New Mexico is an oil painting by Marsden Hartley, created after his time in the Southwest. Though titled after a mining site, the work omits industrial elements entirely, focusing instead on the surrounding terrain. Hartley rendered the landscape not from direct observation but from memory, transforming it into a bold, abstracted vision shaped by emotional resonance rather than topographical accuracy.
Subject & Meaning
The painting’s subject is the New Mexico high desert, but not as a documentary record. Hartley used the landscape as a conduit for internal experience, distilling mountains into sculptural forms and the sky into radiant bands of color. The absence of mines underscores a deliberate shift from human activity to natural grandeur, reflecting a modernist interest in nature as a site of spiritual and formal inquiry.
Technique & Style
Hartley applied thick, textured strokes of oil paint to create a tactile surface, emphasizing the physicality of pigment. Colors, vivid purples, pinks, and golds, are intensified beyond naturalism, with forms simplified into sweeping arcs and jagged silhouettes. Clouds are rendered as swirling, amorphous masses, softening the sharpness of the peaks and enhancing the painting’s dreamlike quality.
History & Provenance
Hartley spent eighteen months in New Mexico between 1918 and 1919, but continued to paint its landscapes from memory for years afterward. This work belongs to that later phase, when his recollections had become more stylized and emotionally charged. The painting reflects his evolving approach: less concerned with place, more with the expressive potential of color and form.
Context
During the post-war years, many American artists turned to the Southwest as a source of renewal and abstraction. Hartley’s work aligned with broader modernist trends that prioritized emotional expression over realism. His reinterpretation of the landscape echoed contemporaneous experiments in European modernism, while retaining a distinctly American sense of space and light.
Legacy
Landscape No. 3 exemplifies Hartley’s contribution to early American modernism by demonstrating how memory could reshape place into abstraction. His use of heightened color and sculptural form influenced later generations of painters seeking to convey inner experience through landscape. The work remains a quiet testament to the power of recollection in artistic transformation.
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Artist & collection
Artist
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist. Hartley developed his painting abilities by observing Cubist artists in Paris and Berlin.
