Date: Fri 03-Apr-1998

Publication: Ant

Author: JUDIR

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Hartley

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Marsden Hartley: American Modern At Portland Museum Of Art

w/cuts

By Stephen May

PORTLAND, ME. -- As is their wont, students of American art argue endlessly

about who was the greatest early American Modernist painter. There are

advocates for such diverse talents as Patrick Henry Bruce, Arthur B. Carles,

Charles Demuth, Stanton MacDonald-Wright, Alfred Maurer, Morgan Russell,

Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella, and Max Weber. Most attention is inevitably

focused, however, on the formidable foursome sponsored by the great New York

gallery impresario, Alfred Stieglitz: Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John

Marin, and Georgia O'Keeffe.

For many of us, it seems increasingly clear that the finest and most enduring

of these American avant-garde artists was the man from Maine, Marsden Hartley

(1877-1943).

Coming of age at a time when the European avant-garde commanded most public

attention and patronage in this country, Hartley and his Modernist compatriots

sought to define an independent American art stimulated by such writers and

philosophers as Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman, painter Alfred Pinkham Ryder,

and others. Relentlessly exploring the U.S. and Europe, Hartley became a key

figure in the rise of American Modernism.

A traveling retrospective, "Marsden Hartley: American Modern," organized by

the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, bolsters

the case for Hartley's importance. Currently in the midst of an extended

national tour, the exhibition remains at the Portland Museum of Art through

April 26. It then travels to venues in California, Louisiana, Oklahoma, the

Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, N.Y. (April 11-June 20, 1999), Tennessee,

Florida, Texas, and closes at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska (July

8-September 21, 2000).

Assembled by Weisman curator and Hartley scholar Patricia McDonnell, the show

features more than 50 works drawn from the largest cache of the artist's

output, the Weisman Art Museum's Ione and Hudson Walker collection. Hudson

Walker, a Minnesota native who became Hartley's last dealer in New York, gave

his Hartley holdings -- 61 paintings and 54 works on paper -- to the

university in his home state.

By just about any measure, Hartley led a troubled, conflicted life. He was a

gay man in a society that frowned on homosexuality, an artist drawn to

abstraction when such work was largely shunned by the public, a man

susceptible to powerful swings of mood and capable of ever-changing artistic

styles. "Like a true Modernist," says curator McDonnell, Hartley "ran through

the full gamut of options then open to avant-garde painters."

Although he was born in the Pine Tree state and always considered himself a

Mainer, Hartley spent years in New York, New Mexico and Europe, constantly

searching for inspiration and success, before resettling in his native state

around the age of 60. Out of his peripatetic experiences came some of the

strongest, most challenging and most memorable paintings of Twentieth Century

American art.

The works in the exhibition, supplemented by the catalogue text, suggest how

Hartley's dramatic shifts in thinking -- often in response to cultural trends

of the day -- were reflected in changes in his art.

Although his formal education was limited -- he never went to college --

Hartley read widely, from American writers like Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman and

William James to French philosopher Henri Bergson to spiritualist texts. Early

in his career he hobnobbed with avante-garde artists on both sides of the

Atlantic and was befriended by Modernist titans Gertrude Stein and Stieglitz.

Born in Lewiston, a gritty Maine mill town, of English immigrant parents in

1877, Hartley had a difficult childhood. His mother died when he was eight;

four years later his father remarried and moved with his new wife to Ohio,

leaving his lonely son with an older sister in Maine. "I lived," Hartley later

recalled, "an entirely imaginative life of my own."

After he joined his father and sisters in Cleveland in 1893, the young man

started taking art lessons. Around the turn of the century he studied at what

is now the Cleveland Institute of Art and then at the New York School of Art

and National Academy of Design in Manhattan. He spent most summers in Maine.

At the age of 29 he changed his first name from Edmund to Marsden, his

stepmother's maiden name.

Around 1907 Hartley began serious painting of Maine landscapes, particularly

mountains. Two years later he gained attention when Stieglitz featured these

early Maine canvases in the artist's first one-person exhibition, at the

pioneering 291 Gallery on Fifth Avenue. In that hotbed of international

avant-garde art Hartley was exposed to the bright colors of Fauvism and new

styles of painting, and was launched into art-world prominence.

Displayed in the exhibition are good examples of Hartley's daring early work,

views of Maine scenery executed in the bold strokes of pure color that

Stieglitz admired. They represented, said the painter, his "efforts at

rendering the God-spirit in the mountains."

Most memorably, "Maine Snowstorm" (1909), a wonderfully blurry blend of whites

and pale blues and greens, conveys the snowy ambience of New England winter in

a manner reminiscent of Connecticut's John Twachtman, albeit with much more

forceful brushwork and heavier impasto. Reflecting the influence of Emerson

and Transcendentalism, these early pictures imply the presence of the divine

spirit in all of nature's manifestations.

In New York, Hartley's exposure to the Stieglitz circle -- notably Dove, Marin

and O'Keeffe -- and Modernists from Europe such as Matisse and Picasso,

stimulated experiments in avant-garde compositions. "Abstraction" of 1911

shows Hartley's explorations of approaches along the lines of his colleagues

Dove and Marin, while his strong "Still Life: Fruit" (1911) indicates he was

paying close attention to Cezanne's orderly canvases.

The bond between the shy, insecure Hartley and the magnetic, assertive

Stieglitz was close and long-lasting. As late as 1926, Stieglitz could boast

that "Hartley, like Marin and Dove and O'Keeffe, is one of my babies." Their

relations became strained later. In 1939 Hudson Walker became Hartley's

dealer.

In 1912 Hartley realized his ambition to visit Europe, where he stayed for

three and a half years, first in Paris and then in Berlin. In Paris his

heightened interest in Cezanne was reflected in splendid still lifes such as

"Still Life" (1912) and others, with tilted tabletops, simple objects,

decorative patterns, and a muted palette.

In Europe, Hartley's inclinations toward mysticism were increased by reading

the writings and viewing the art of Russian expatriate Wassily Kandinsky, whom

he met in Berlin.

Hartley soon came into the Parisian orbit of Gertrude Stein, who welcomed him

into her salon of progressive writers and artists and praised his work. "[A]t

last," she said of Hartley, "an original American."

Stein's enthusiasm for his work not only encouraged the artist but gave him

standing in the City of Light. "The best asset I have...over here is Gertrude

Stein," he wrote Stieglitz in 1913. Hartley and Stein also shared an interest

in the writings of William James, which led him to readings in European

spiritualist works, and encouraged forays into non-objective art. "Abstraction

with Flowers" of 1913 is an example of this style.

Hartley continued to sort through a variety of artistic challenges when he

relocated to Berlin in 1913. In the German capital on the eve of World War I

he created some of the most significant work of his career.

The American traveler developed a real "passion" for Berlin, which he found to

be a thoroughly modern, orderly, and clean city. He delighted in the military

pomp and pageantry of imperial Germany, with its frequent parades, drills of

men in uniform, and other demonstrations of masculine strength and discipline.

Berlin was well-known at this time for its relaxed attitude toward

homosexuality. To Hartley it seemed filled with appealing, blond young men in

uniform. He developed an intimate friendship with a handsome young Prussian

officer, Karl von Freyburg.

Hartley's early Berlin paintings, in a style he called "cosmic Cubism," such

as "The Warriors" (1913), blending vivid colors, numbers, military insignia

and parade motifs, suggest his excitement at the lively martial spectacle

swirling around him. Boldly personal, they also combined Kandinsky's

improvisations with the brilliant colors of Franz Marc and other German

Expressionists.

Hartley's exuberance dimmed after war was declared in August 1914. Within a

few months his dear friend, Lieutenant von Freyburg, died on the Western Front

and other acquaintances were killed or wounded in combat. His art took on a

less celebratory tone in a series of paintings that were both memorials to his

slain companion and tributes to the masses of war dead.

In late 1915 Hartley returned to New York, where anti-German sentiment was

running high. The following spring his Berlin works received a generally

chilly response when displayed at Stieglitz's gallery. Hartley's imagery,

complained leading critic Henry McGride, reflected "all the pomp and

circumstance of war." Stieglitz's wife, O'Keeffe, on the other hand, thought

the work was "like a brass band in a small closet."

Despondent about criticism of what he thought constituted his best work to

date, Hartley reassessed his situation. Concluding that the war had fomented a

distrust of artistic experimentation, he decided he needed, as McDonnell puts

it, to "redefine himself as an artist."

Before he began the swing from pre-1916 faith in subjectivity to post-1917

belief in objectivity, he painted "One Portrait of One Woman" (1916), which

incorporated the bold colors and symbolic motifs of his German work in a

somewhat enigmatic homage to Gertrude Stein.

Depressed by America's entry into the war in 1917, Hartley sought relief in a

sojourn in New Mexico, at the invitation of Manhattan patron Mabel Dodge, who

had relocated to Taos. In that wide open, Southwestern terrain, the Yankee

artist became reacquainted with the American landscape. "I am the American

rediscovering America," he wrote in a 1918 essay. "America as landscape is

profoundly stirring," he added, promoting the idea that native painters should

have "firsthand contact with it."

He recorded the arroyos and sweeping vistas of New Mexico in a series of

subtly-shaded, lovely pastels and paintings. "I am bewitched by...[the]

magnificence and austerity" of the landscape, he declared. "It is the only

place in America where true color exists." With pastels such as "New Mexico"

(1918) and oils like "Western Flame" (1920), he began to work in what he

described as "a sturdier kind of realism...that shall approach the solidity of

landscape itself."

For a time, seeking to be as "American" as possible, he became, as McDonnell

puts it, "resolutely objective" in his work. The bold, forcefully painted

still lifes of the 1920s, such as "Still Life" (1923) and "Fleurs D'Orphee"

(1928), suggest his rational approach to painting during this period.

By the 1930s he had softened the "scientific objectivity" of his work,

introducing greater personal feelings into his artistic vocabulary. In some of

his most compelling images to date, he depicted the massive boulders he

observed on the Dogtown Common near Gloucester, Mass. (Similar still lifes and

landscapes from the Dogtown period were recently on sale at the Art Dealers

Association of America Art Show, reported in the March 13 issue, for prices

ranging from $165,000 to $225,000.) A winter sojourn in the Bavarian Alps

resulted in several Cezanne-like pastels of the mountainous terrain around

Carmisch-Partenkirchen.

The most personal work of this period, "Eight Bells: Memorial to Hart Crane"

(1933), filled with symbolic numbers and shapes, constitutes a powerful

tribute to his friend, the poet Crane, who had committed suicide. It is a

vibrant, memorable image, Ryderesque in its blocky forms.

After more overseas wanderings in the 1930s, Hartley finally returned to the

state of his birth in 1937. That first summer he stayed with the widow/muse of

sculptor Gaston Lachaise in Georgetown, on the coast near Bath, where he was

inspired by the rocky seaside. In Maine, the tentative subjectivity of recent

years was replaced by a more pronounced, assured manner.

The return of the native to the Pine Tree state coincided with heightened

national interest in regional art. Declaring himself "the painter from Maine,"

he set out to depict aspects of the state's scenery in idiosyncratic,

intensely emotional paintings. "I returned to my tall timbers and my granite

cliffs," Hartley said in 1938, "because in them rests the kind of integrity I

believe in and from which source I draw my private strength both spiritually

and esthetically."

While few of the powerful paintings of Maine are included in the current

exhibition - they are prized possessions of other museums all over the country

- there are highly evocative works on paper of Maine and several potent

portraits of the rugged folk of nearby Nova Scotia for whom Hartley developed

a deep affection.

While staying with the Masons, a family of intrepid fishermen in Nova Scotia,

the painter came face to face with the dangers and hardships confronting these

men of the sea on a daily basis. He also experienced additional abrupt deaths,

continuing his life-long pattern of loss and isolation. Hartley was devastated

by the drowning deaths of two of the Mason sons, particularly Alty Mason, to

whom he had become closely attached.

Other paintings of fishermen following Alty Mason's drowning, infused with

images of Christian martyrdom, were executed in a direct, almost primitive

manner. "Nova Scotia Fishermen" (1938), a compelling oil painted after he

returned to Maine, disconsolate and ill, sold at Sotheby's last December for

$745,000.

The Maine drawings on view lack the craggy power of his late oils, but they do

convey his innate feel for the state's rockbound landscape and his sensitivity

to the rhythms of local life. Hartley was particularly drawn to towering Mount

Katahdin, which he depicted in several impressive paintings. "I know I have

seen God now," he declared after climbing up the mountain. "Mount Katahdin"

(1940-41), a black crayon sketch, captures some of the drama and skyward

thrust of that Maine landmark.

Perhaps the most powerful works of Hartley's entire career are his final

seascapes. They are boldly stroked, highly simplified images of timeless

beauty and potency. As the great art historian Oliver Larkin observed, in

"Hartley's splendid last five years...thanks to his friend Hudson Walker,

Americans rediscovered a painter-poet whose imagination could match Ryder's

and whose waves moved with the power of Winslow Homer's."

Before he had time to move onto even greater heights, Hartley died in

Ellsworth, Me., in 1943. He was 66 years old.

In 1993 critic Robert Hughes wrote that "Marsden Hartley is tremendously

important." By placing his art in the context of his times, this exhibition

underscores that importance and sheds new light on one of America's master

artists.

The fully-illustrated exhibition catalogue, written by curator McDonnell,

stresses Hartley's shifting artistic practices and beliefs in the context of

the turbulent times through which he lived. The text is supplemented with a

helpful chronology.

One interesting nugget in the catalogue: while Hughes in his recent book,

American Visions, declares that "no photo of von Freyburg [Hartley's Berlin

love] has survived," McDonnell displays on page 37 a 1913 photograph of the

handsome German officer on horseback. The photograph is from the Beinecke Rare

Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

The Portland Museum of Art is at Seven Congress Square, Portland, Me.

Telephone 207/775-6148.