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His early paintings, of the 1870s, are stiff, naive and curiously old- fashioned; they are almost exactly like the work that Raphaelle Peale, America's first still-life artist, had been doing around 1815. But Harnett hit his stride in the 1880s, and in fact the most beautiful painting in this show, The Artist's Letter Rack, dates from 1879: an image of letters, visiting cards and a theater ticket, the meager index of an artist's social life, held by a crisscrossed square of pink tape to an unvarnished pine board. Everything is actual size, and the flatness of the board corresponds to the flatness of the painting, so that the illusion is nearly absolute. The pencil and chalk marks on the board look just like pencil and chalk, every grain line in the cheap wood and fiber in a torn paper edge is there, and the play of the yellow and blue rectangles and envelopes against the square of tape has the lovely spareness of a Motherwell collage.
Few other paintings in his career show the same fine play between aesthetic intent and illusionism. Usually it's the eye-fooling that wins. The comment of a great American Modernist, Marsden Hartley, is cited by one essayist: "In Harnett there is nothing to bother about, nothing to confuse, nothing to $ interpret . . . there is the myopic persistence to render every single thing singly." The catalog protests this, pointing to the stories that underlie the conglomerations of things in his still lifes, which do indeed provide something to interpret. But was this what Hartley meant? In fact, no. He saw what is plainly true -- that in Harnett there is little imaginative dimension beyond the winsome, rebus-like narrative and the skill.
The late 19th century art audience, especially in America, liked "puzzle pictures" -- images that told a hidden story. Still life was a standard vehicle for these. It was the end of an older tradition, that of the allegorical table piece, the vanitas paintings that were so popular in the Netherlands in the 17th century. In them the lowly objects of still-life painting become allegories of the senses or, with a skull and some musty books, of death. Where Harnett is weakest and most derivative is, precisely, where he tried to tell his stories. He liked mild, kitschy allegorizing. His invocations of the past (the classical bronze and the broken copy of Cervantes' Don Quixote in The Old Cupboard Door, 1889, for instance) are parlor antiquarianism with nothing to say about history. What they respond to is the diffuse sentimentality about the past felt by people ill at ease with the rawness and bustle of the American republic, in the days before bric-a- brac became "collectibles."
It would be some time -- about half a century after Harnett's death, in fact -- before another and more reclusive American, Joseph Cornell, would drag his fine net through the junk stores of New York and turn what it caught into frail, unique feats of the imagination that reach beyond illusionism and nostalgia. One can't not enjoy Harnett, but he is not an artist one should overrate.