Rubber Plant

Rubber Plant is an oil painting by American modernist Marsden Hartley, created in 1920 during his brief immersion in the New York Dada movement. The title carries a deliberate double meaning: it may refer to the tropical tree cultivated for latex production, or to a factory manufacturing rubber goods such as automobile tires—a subject of both Dadaist derision and enchantment. Hartley contributed poetry to New York Dada magazine alongside Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, and that same year published an essay, 'The Importance of Being Dada,' pledging his allegiance to the movement's comedic and anti-mechanical sensibility. The work entered the Yale University Art Gallery as part of the gift of Collection Société Anonyme, the pioneering modern-art organization co-founded by Duchamp and Katherine Dreier, of which Hartley served as first secretary. Hartley spent his teenage years in Ohio, the center of the American rubber industry, lending the painting a quietly autobiographical undercurrent.