Yliaster (Paracelsus)
1932
Medium
Painting
Classification
Painting
Department
Smithsonian Collection
Museum
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Credit
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase made possible by the Smithsonian Institution Collections Acquisition Program and by George Frederick Watts and Mrs. James Lowndes
Accession Number
1988.53
Tags
About this artwork
To Americans in the 1930s, Mexico represented an ancient and deeply spiritual civilization much different from the industrial culture to the north. Artists and writers returned to the United States exalted by the myths and rituals that permeated the everyday lives of the Mexican people. Hartley made the trip in 1932 on a Guggenheim Fellowship, absorbing the primeval landscapes and surviving remnants of Aztec art. In a private library in Mexico City, he read that the medieval mystic Paracelsus ha...
About the Artist
Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) was one of the most significant and searching figures of American modernism, an artist whose restless travels and personal intensity drove him to synthesize European avant-garde currents with a deeply American sensibility rooted in landscape, loss, and spiritual longing. Born in Lewiston, Maine, he studied at the Cleveland School of Art and later at the National Academy...