Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley
1877 - 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.)
In Boston, Hartley saw the Post-Impressionist work of Maurice Prendergast, who encouraged him and shared his enthusiasm for the art of Cézanne. Hartley moved in spring of 1909 to New York, where he mixed in avant-garde circles, and in May he had a one-man exhibition at the 291 gallery, run by Alfred Stieglitz. Stieglitz’s support and tastes had a great impact on his development, but the immediate influence on sombre landscapes such as the Dark Mountain (1909; Chicago, IL, A. Inst.) was the art of Albert Pinkham Ryder.
Inspired by the introduction to European modernism that Stieglitz gave him in 1912, Hartley went to live in Paris, where he became friends with Gertrude Stein. The earliest of his paintings in Paris reveal his interest in Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso, whose work he had seen at Stein’s home. The bright colours and decorative patterned fabrics employed in some of his still-lifes reflect the influence of Matisse’s work. However, he soon became increasingly involved with his new discoveries: mysticism, the art of Vasily Kandinsky, and primitive objects illustrated in the almanac Der Blaue Reiter.
Hartley was very interested in the theories and work of Kandinsky, whom he met on travelling to Germany in 1913, along with Franz Marc and other avant-garde artists. Although Hartley celebrated pre-war military pageantry in Berlin, he rejected the Futurists’ admiration of military force in favour of pacifist Native American themes, which he depicted in Indian Fantasy (1914; Raleigh, NC, Mus. A.). He also enjoyed the city’s homosexual subculture, falling in love with a Prussian officer, whose death he memorialized in 1914 in a series of emblematic abstractions influenced by Synthetic Cubism, including Portrait of a German Officer (New York, Met.).
Forced by the war to return to the USA, Hartley lived a peripatetic existence. During summer 1916 he worked in Provincetown on Cape Cod, MA, where he produced geometric abstractions based on sailboat motifs, for example Movement No. 9 (1916; Minneapolis, MN, Walker A. Cent.). In winter 1916–17 he stayed in Bermuda. From then until his return to Europe in 1921 he worked in Maine, New York, New Mexico and Gloucester, MA. During this period he abandoned abstraction and returned to landscape and still-life. He briefly experimented with painting on glass in 1917 and from 1918 produced a series of pastels and oil paintings of the New Mexico landscape, for example Landscape, New Mexico (1919–20; New York, Whitney). From 1925 to 1929 he painted in the south of France, basing himself at Vence and Aix-en-Provence, where he emulated the work of Cézanne in studies such as Trees and Rocks (silverpoint on prepared paper, 1927; Ann Arbor, U. MI, Mus. A.).
In the 1930s Hartley painted in Mexico, Bavaria, Gloucester, Bermuda and Nova Scotia, before returning in 1937 to Maine, where, except for stays in New York, he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He began an important series of expressionist memory portraits in 1938, including Adelard the Drowned, Master of the Phantom (1938–9; Minneapolis, U. MN, A. Mus.) on the island of Vinalhaven, ME, and continued to develop his interest in the figure. His attachment to nature, and in particular to the Maine landscape and seascape, inspired many of his late works, such as Mountain Katahdin (1942; Washington, DC, N.G.). [Gail Levin. "Hartley, Marsden." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 8, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T036784.]
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