In the summer of 1918, Marsden Hartley traveled to New Mexico, where he encountered a landscape unlike anything he had previously experienced. Captivated by the stark beauty of the American Southwest, its monumental, “altar-like” mountains, vast blue skies, and extraordinary quality of light, Hartley embarked on one of the most distinctive periods of landscape painting in his career. He would later characterize this experience as that of “an American discovering America,” reflecting the profound sense of artistic and personal revelation he found in the region.

Hartley first arrived in Taos in June 1918, encouraged by the influential arts patron Mabel Dodge, who had established a thriving artistic and literary community there. Seeking respite from New York, Hartley had written earlier that year to Harriet Monroe, editor of Poetry magazine, of his desire to travel west, “chiefly to do a lot of painting and writing in peace and quiet.” He remained in Taos through the summer before relocating to Santa Fe in October. Following an extended visit to California in early 1919, he returned to New Mexico that June, continuing his exploration of the landscape until his departure for New York in November.

New Mexico Landscape belongs to a remarkable group of pastels Hartley created during this period, works that reveal his fascination with the region's dramatic topography and luminous atmosphere. Pastel proved particularly well suited to his artistic ambitions, offering both the portability necessary for working directly in the desert and a brilliant range of high-keyed colors with which to capture the intensity of the Southwestern light. Unlike his earlier, more overtly abstract compositions, these works demonstrate a renewed engagement with the natural world, although his expressive use of color and simplified forms remained distinctly modernist.

Hartley was especially struck by the unexpected colors of the Southwestern landscape. In letters to his dealer Alfred Stieglitz, he observed that, rather than the reds and yellows he had anticipated, the terrain revealed extraordinary variations of blues, greens, pinks, and purples. These vibrant hues animate New Mexico Landscape, in which color becomes as much an expression of the artist's emotional response to the land as a description of its physical appearance.

Hartley's enthusiasm for the region was profound. Writing of the landscape, he declared that “any of these beautiful arroyos and canyons is a living example of the splendor of the ages,” adding that he was “bewitched with their magnificence and their austerity.” For Hartley, New Mexico offered more than a new subject; it represented an opportunity to discover a distinctly American landscape capable of inspiring the same spiritual and artistic intensity he had previously sought in Europe.

Today, Hartley's New Mexico scenes are recognized as an important body of work within his career, bridging his early modernist experimentation with the deeply personal landscape paintings that would increasingly define his later practice. Related works from this period are held in major museum collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

New Mexico Landscape is included in the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project: Complete Paintings and Works on Paper, undertaken in association with the Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine.