Marsden Hartley

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(b Lewiston, ME, 4 Jan 1877; d Ellsworth, ME, 2 Sept 1943). American painter and writer. He spent part of his youth in Cleveland, OH, where in 1896 he studied art with a local painter, John Semon. After study at the Cleveland School of Art (1898-9), he entered the Chase School in New York (1899) and the National Academy of Design (1900-04). From 1900 he regularly spent his summers in Maine, a state for which he maintained an enduring passion. At the end of autumn 1907 he moved from Maine to Boston, MA. By this stage his painting was progressing from an American form of Impressionism to a type of Neo-Impressionism. Partly inspired by illustrations in the German satirical magazine Jugend, he emulated the divisionist technique of Giovanni Segantini, for example in Mountain Lake in the Autumn (1908; Washington, DC, Phillips Col.).

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was an American painter whose finest, most original works depict Maine's rocky shoreline and the fishermen who depend upon the sea for their livelihood.

Marsden Hartley's family left England to settle in Maine, where he was born. His first drawings were inspired by his interest in natural history. He studied on a scholarship at the Cleveland School of Art (1892-1898). Then he went to New York City to study painting under William Merritt Chase and Frank Dumond.

Hartley's earliest paintings after leaving school are impressionist and suggest the influence of the Italian painter Giovanni Segantini, whose work Hartley knew only through reproductions. Alfred Stieglitz gave Hartley his first exhibition at his "291" gallery. The show consisted mostly of "black landscapes, " done in the manner of Albert P. Ryder.

In 1912 Hartley traveled to Paris, Munich, and Berlin. Although he experimented with cubism, in Germany he discovered the style which provided the expressive pictorial elements he would develop during the rest of his career. He exhibited with the Blaue Reiter group in Munich and made friends with Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and Paul Klee. A characteristic painting of this expressionist phase is Portrait of a German Officer (1914). Here Hartley expresses military pomp by showing only the officer's epaulets, abstracted with heightened color in contrast with coarse, black contours. This emblematic approach was modified some 3 years later when he turned to Paul Cézanne's work for direction. The influence of Cézanne is evident in Hartley's work as late as 1928.

In 1930 Hartley returned to America, where, except for brief visits to Mexico and Germany, he remained, doing his finest work. In Nova Scotia and in Bangor, Maine, he painted the craggy shoreline, dramatizing the dolmenlike rocks that were tilted as if to pit their bulk against a surging sea and a threatening sky. The sailboats that venture out in this inhospitable setting epitomize human indomitability and man's skill at harnessing natural powers. Hartley's most impressive paintings are his "archaic memory portraits" of Nova Scotia seamen, first exhibited in 1938. Hieratic and frontal, these figures are as austere and spiritualized as the saints depicted in Russian icons. It is as if these fishermen and their wives are immobilized and transfixed by the constant fear inherent in their perilous profession. Hartley painted a series of pictures of Mt. Katahdin, emulating, as he noted, the Japanese painter Ando Hiroshige, and, one might add, Cézanne.

Hartley also wrote verse. His first book, Twenty-five Poems, was published in Paris in 1922. He died at Ellsworth, Maine, on Sept. 2, 1943.

Further Reading

Elizabeth McCausland, Marsden Hartley (1952), is an extensive work on the artist. The Museum of Modern Art's catalog Lyonel Feininger - Marsden Hartley (1944) includes a brief text with some statements by the artist and a chronology of significant biographical events.

Additional Sources

Hartley, Marsden, Somehow a past: the autobiography of Marsden Hartley, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996.

Ludington, Townsend, Marsden Hartley: the biography of an American artist, Boston: Little, Brown, 1992.

Robertson, Bruce, Marsden Hartley, New York: Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1995.

Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer 1914
Born	January 4, 1877(1877-01-04) Lewiston, Maine, USA
Died	September 2, 1943 (aged 66)
Nationality	American
Field	Painting
Training	Cleveland Institute of Art, National Academy of Design
Movement	American Modernism

Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 - September 2, 1943) was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist of the early 20th century. Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, USA, where his English parents had settled. He began his art training at the Cleveland Institute of Art after the family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1892. He was born Edmund Hartley, but chose to take on his step-mother's maiden name, Marsden, as his first name.

Contents 1 New York City 2 Travels 3 Writing 4 References 5 Bibliography 6 External links

New York City

At the age of 22, Hartley moved to New York City, where he attended the National Academy of Design and studied painting at the Art Students League of New York under William Merritt Chase. A great admirer of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Hartley would visit Ryder's studio in Greenwich Village as often as possible. While in New York, he came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and became associated with Stieglitz' 291 Gallery Group. Hartley had his first major exhibition at the 291 Gallery in 1909 and another in 1912. He was in the cultural vanguard, in the same milieu as Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Fernand Léger, Ezra Pound, Arnold Ronnebeck among many others.

Hartley, who was gay,^[1] painted Portrait of a German Officer^[2] (1914), which was an ode to Karl von Freyburg, his friend Arnold Ronnebeck's cousin and a Prussian lieutenant of whom he became enamored before von Freyburg's death in World War I.

Travels

Marsden Hartley traveled throughout the USA and Europe in the early years of the 20th century. Considered an early modernist, Hartley was a nomadic painter for much of his life. He painted from Maine to Massachusetts, in New Mexico, California, New York and Western Europe. Finally, after spending many years away from his native state, he returned to Maine toward the end of his life. He wanted to become "the painter of Maine" and depict American life at a local level. In this way, he is a member of the regionalists, a group of artists from the early to mid 20th century that attempted to represent a distinctly "American art."

Writing

In addition to being considered one of the foremost American painters of the first half of the 20th century, Hartley also wrote poems, essays, and stories.

Cleophas and His Own: A North Atlantic Tragedy is a story based on two periods he spent in 1935 and 1936 with the Mason family in the Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, fishing community of East Point Island. Hartley, then in his late 50s, found there both an innocent, unrestrained love and the sense of family he had been seeking since his unhappy childhood in Maine. The impact of this experience lasted until his death in 1943 and helped widen the scope of his mature works, which included numerous portrayals of the Masons.

He wrote of the Masons, "Five magnificent chapters out of an amazing, human book, these beautiful human beings, loving, tender, strong, courageous, dutiful, kind, so like the salt of the sea, the grit of the earth, the sheer face of the cliff." In Cleophas and His Own, written in Nova Scotia in the fall of 1936 and re-printed in Marsden Hartley and Nova Scotia, Hartley expresses his immense grief at the tragic drowning of the Mason sons. The independent filmmaker Michael Maglaras has created a feature film Cleophas and His Own, released in 2005, which uses a personal testament by Hartley as its screenplay.

A "catalogue raisonne" of Hartley's work is underway by art historian Gail Levin, Distinguished Professor at Baruch College, and The Graduate Center of The City University of New York.

References

1. ^ Gonzales-Day, Ken (2002), "Hartley, Marsden (1877-1943)", glbtq.com, http://www.glbtq.com/arts/hartley_m.html, retrieved 2007-11-14 
2. ^ Portrait of a German Officer | Marsden Hartley | All | All Departments | Collection Database | Works of Art | The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York at www.metmuseum.org

Bibliography

• Cassidy, Donna M. Marsden Hartley: Race, Region, and Nation. Hanover: University Press of New England, 2005.
• Coco, Janice. "Dialogues with the Self: New Thoughts on Marsden Hartley's Self-Portraits." Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 30 (2005): 623-649.
• Ferguson, Gerald, Ed. [Essays by Ronald Paulson and Gail R. Scott]. Marsden Hartley and Nova Scotia. Halifax: The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 1987. ISBN 0-919616-32-1
• Harnsberger, R. Scott. Four Artists of the Stieglitz Circle: A Sourcebook on Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, and Max Weber [Art Reference Collection, no. 26]. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002.
• Hartley, Marsden. Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1921.
• Hartley, Marsden. Selected Poems: Marsden Hartley. Ed. Henry W. Wells. New York: Viking Press, 1945.
• Hartley, Marsden. Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley. Ed. Susan Elizabeth Ryan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.
• Haskell, Barbara. Marsden Hartley. Exhibition Catalogue. Whitney Museum of American Art. New York: New York University Press, 1980.
• Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin, Ed. Marsden Hartley. Exhibition catalogue. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
• Ludington, Townsend. Marsden Hartley: The Biography of an American Artist. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992.
• Scott, Gail R. Marsden Hartley. New York: Abbeville Press, 1988.
• Weinberg, Jonathan. Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant- Garde. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley writings

• Scans of Hartley's Adventures in the arts: informal chapters on painters, vaudeville and poets
• The Importance of Being "Dada" from Adventures in the arts.

Museums

• Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection and Archives, Bates College Museum of Art.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Marsden Hartley
• Marsden Hartley - The National Gallery of Art
• Marsden Hartley: American Modern - Memphis Brooks Museum of Art

Biographies and articles

• Marsden Hartley Biography: Hollis Taggart Galleries
• Marsden Hartley and Nova Scotia
• Cleophas and His Own a film by Michael Maglaras
• Marsden Hartley, Art and the Personal Life, 1928, by Hartley accessed online Aug. 7, 2007

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