Landscape No. 3, Cash Entry Mines, New Mexico

In Landscape No. 3, Cash Entry Mines, New Mexico, Marsden Hartley used short brushstrokes, patches of pigment, and abstracted cloud forms to portray soaring mountains under a vibrant sky, intentionally minimizing the industrial mines that are the subject of this composition. The artist had spent eighteen months in New Mexico from 1918 until he returned to New York in 1919, but he continued to paint the Southwest from memory for several years, increasingly exaggerating the dramatic terrain and brilliant hues as time passed. For Hartley, as for so many artists who visited the Southwest, the remembered landscape became a vehicle for modernist exploration of color and shape.