Marsden Hartley

A provocative new reading of the great American avant-garde arist Marsden Hartley's late work.

"Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was a painter, poet, writer, and pioneer of American modernism. Born in Lewiston, Maine, he lived a peripatetic life, working in Paris, Berlin, New York, Mexico, New Mexico, Bermuda, and elsewhere before returning to Maine in 1934. This superbly illustrated book encompasses the extraordinary range and depth of Hartley's creative output. Some one-hundred and five of his works - landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and abstract paintings - demonstrate the visual power for which Hartley gained acclaim as well as the development of his art over the course of his thirty-five year career." "The book gathers together the most recent scholarship on Hartley's work, discussing such topics as the artist's working methods, his self-portraits, the influence of Cezanne on his work, and Hartley's attitudes toward Native Americans. A chronology of his life is included, and each painting is accompanied by a full catalogue entry." "This book also serves as the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and traveling to the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A revelatory look at Hartley's New Mexico landscapes and the darker side of postwar American modernism Considered to be among the greatest early American modernists, the painter Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) traveled the United States and Europe in his search for a distinctive American aesthetic. His stay in New Mexico resulted in an extraordinary series of landscape paintings--created in New Mexico, New York, and Europe between 1918 and 1924--that show an evolution in style and thinking that is important for understanding both Hartley's oeuvre and American modernism in the postwar years. Marsden Hartley and the West examines this pivotal stage of the painter's career, drawing upon his writings and providing illustrations of rarely seen and previously unpublished works. The author considers Hartley's involvement with the Stieglitz circle and its "soil-and-spirit" philosophy, the Taos art colony, New York Dada, and the impact of historical events such as World War I. Within this setting she analyzes the pastels and oil paintings that suggest Hartley's increasingly ambivalent response to the land. Beginning with optimistic, naturalistic views, the New Mexico works grew progressively darker and more tumultuous, increasingly reflecting a sense of loss brought on by war. The paintings become a site where the landscapes of memory, self, and nation merge, while reflecting broader modernist debates about "American-ness" and a usable past.

Hailed as "America's first great modern painter of the 20th century" and "one of the most intriguing art historical subjects of all time", Marsden Hartley remains relatively unknown to a European audience. This Louisiana presentation marks the first major retrospective exhibition of his work in Europe in over 60 years. The work of the American painter and poet Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) can be regarded as a bridge between European and American modernism. Hartley lived much of his life nomadically between Europe and the USA, and his travels produced a number of profoundly original groups of works from 1906 until 1943. Among these we can count a series of abstract paintings created with a point of departure in military symbols from the horrors of the First World War; desolate, almost surreal landscapes from New Mexico; feminized figure paintings of muscular working men. Exhibition: Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (19.09.2019-19.01.2020).

"A penetrating biography.... Ludington offers a psychological portrait of an intense, contradictory, scornful, but gentle man who transcended his nineteenth-century roots in Lewiston, Maine, to view Europe as his home and to make a distinctive contribution to modernism."--Kirkus Reviews"Drawing on Hartley's letters and other writings as well as on the correspondence and reminiscences of the artist's friends, Ludington traces the restless career of the painter.... [Hartley] had troubled friendships with some of the most important artists and writers of his day--Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Fairfield Porter, Eugene O'Neill, Georgia O'Keeffe, and others. His relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, who supported him financially and exhibited his work, ... runs like a leitmotif through the book, and indicates Hartley's character--demanding, touchy, often ungrateful but also compelling.... This frank and unsentimental account of a life of contradictions and paradoxes returns one to the artist's paintings with a fresh eye."--Publishers Weekly"Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) had a virtually unique role as a modernist painter. He was notable not only for his powerful canvases but for his poetry and essays. Townsend Ludington's astute portrait of the artist focuses upon his cosmopolitan sensibility in a generation melding modern art with an American tradition of mystical idealism.... Ludington views Hartley as an essential American artist embarked on a spiritual odyssey."--Robert Taylor, Boston Globe

Marsden Hartley had a lifelong personal and aesthetic engagement with Maine, where he was born in 1877 and where he died at age sixty-six. As an important member of the artistic circle promoted by Alfred Stieglitz, Hartley began his career by painting the mountains of western Maine. He subsequently led a peripatetic life, traveling throughout Europe and North America and only occasionally visiting his native state. By midlife, however, his itinerant existence had taken an emotional toll, and he confided to Stieglitz that he wanted “so earnestly a ‘place’ to be.” Finally returning to the state in his later years, he transformed his identity from urbane sophisticate to “the painter from Maine.” But while Maine has played a clear and defining role in Hartley’s art, not until now has this relationship been studied with the breadth and richness it warrants. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 14.0px Verdana} Marsden Hartley’s Maine is the first in-depth discussion of Hartley’s complex and shifting relationship to his native state. Illustrated with works from throughout the painter’s career, it provides a nuanced understanding of Hartley’s artistic range, from the exhilarating Post-Impressionist landscapes of his early years to the late, roughly rendered paintings of Maine and its people. The absorbing essays examine Hartley’s view of Maine as a place of light and darkness whose spirit imbued his art, which encompassed buoyant coastal views, mournful mountain vistas, and portraits of Mainers. An illustrated chronology provides an overview of Hartley’s life, juxtaposing major personal incidents with concurrent events in Maine’s history. For Hartley, who was strongly influenced by such artists as Paul Cézanne, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, Maine was an enduring source of inspiration, one powerfully intertwined with his past, his cultural milieu, and his desire to create a regional expression of American modernism.

Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was a writer and a spiritual seeker, as well as a distinguished American painter. In his introduction to this generously illustrated volume, Townsend Ludington explores the relationships among Hartley's art, poetry, and essays. He traces the philosophical and literary sources that nourished the artist's evolving spiritual consciousness.Raised in Lewiston, Maine, Hartley felt at odds with life. A voracious reader, he educated himself and became enamored of the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and, particularly, of Walt Whitman. He began spending winters in New York City where he met and was befriended by Alfred Stieglitz. He visited Europe but remained restless for the right physical environment. Eventually returning to New England, Hartley painted in Dogtown, Massachusetts, in the low hills behind the port of Gloucester, and the stark landscape there stimulated some of his most famous paintings.Throughout his career, Hartley painted landscapes and seascapes in which he tried to convey his sense of the wonder of earth, at the same time attempting to articulate the spiritual awareness that came to him in the "magic of dreams." Consciously representative of modernism, Hartley strove to express, as Wallace Stevens said, "not ideas about the thing but the thing itself." He believed that the acts of reading, writing, and painting gave significance to the world accessible to his senses. This book is published with the cooperation of the Ackland Museum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the Babcock Galleries in New York City.

"Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was proud to call himself an American artist, but he dreamed of travel to Europe, believing that he would learn more there than in his home state of Maine or even New York. His rise to prominence as a specifically American modernist was based largely on the visual influences that he encountered in 1912-15 in the vibrant cities of Paris, Berlin, and Munich, which he then synthesized through a New England perspective. Solitary by nature, Hartley never lost his wanderlust, and throughout his life found inspiration in many other landscapes and cultures. Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts provides a fresh appraisal of this pioneering modernist, whose work continues to be celebrated for its spirituality and experimentation. Insightful essays explore the manifold ways in which Hartley's peripatetic life shaped his artistic vision, while detailed studies of works he created in places as diverse as Provence, Nova Scotia, and Mexico are accompanied by personal photographs, postcards, and images of some of the possessions he gathered on his travels. Also included are reproductions of a photograph album that Hartley compiled, a "Color Exercises" notebook, and his typescript "Elephants and Rhinestones: A Book of the Circus"."--