Marsden Hartley: American Modern

Marsden Hartley: American Modern

All works in the exhibition are from the FrederickR.WeismanArt Museum. All works came as a bequest of Hudson Walker from the Ione and Hudson Walker Collection, unless otherwise noted.

Maine Snowstorm, 1908

Oil on canvas

Gift of Ione and Hudson Walker

From 1905 to 1911, Hartley alternated between living in New York City and in the mountains of Maine. During these years, he concentrated on “rendering the God-spirit in the mountains.” Maine Snowstorm represents the young artist’s innovative translation of his perceptions of intrinsic spiritual forces in nature. The exaggerated brushwork suggests the vitality he sensed in nature. Every inch of the canvas is energized by the touch of his brush. The picture surface is animated evenly by paint strokes to signal his belief that a universal “spirit substance in all things” coursed throughout nature.

Summer, 1908

Oil on academy board

This group of late-impressionist paintings shows Hartley working to capture the many moods of nature. Instead of attempting a careful depiction of the hillside in these works, he focused on his own powerful response to nature. He wanted to convey “little visions of the great intangible.” The paintings’ diversity—different seasons, light conditions, and foliage color, all captured within the same basic compositional format—reveal the range of Hartley’s emotional register in the Maine mountains.

Landscape No. 36, 1908-1909

Oil on canvas

Hartley began frequenting Alfred Stieglitz’s art gallery in New York, where the first American exhibitions of work by European modernists such as Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso took place. The adoption of brilliant color in this painting shows Hartley’s reaction to the April 1908 and February 1909 Stieglitz exhibitions of drawings by Matisse, the French artist known for his fauve or wild-color experiments.

Autumn, 1908

Oil on academy board

Autumn, 1908

Oil on canvas

The energy of Hartley’s brushstrokes—the fury with which he lays down his strokes and their loose or random organization—marks this work as very radical for its day. By leaving out the horizon line and focusing the field of vision on the dense network of trees and wooded foliage, Hartley creates a forceful tension between two- and three-dimensional readings of the image. He thwarts recession into depth with the thicket of paint marks that draw attention to the picture surface.

Songs of Winter, c. 1908

Oil on academy board

Self-Portrait, c. 1908

Charcoal on cream wove paper

Hartley was 31 years old when he made this work. The quick, forceful strokes of the charcoal pencil convey an emotional power. This aspect of the drawing shows well the personal expressiveness that Hartley championed.

Mountainside, 1909

Oil on academy board

Deserted Farm, 1909

Oil on composition board

Gift of Ione and Hudson Walker

This is one of a series of desolate, brooding landscape paintings Hartley made in 1909. The mood created by the somber colors and forlorn scenery reflects his depressed mental state at the time.

Landscape No. 14, 1909

Oil on academy board

Waterfall, 1910

Oil on academy board

Although this painting is only one or two years later than the other works on this wall, its abstractness indicates a more radical approach. With the horizon removed, it is more difficult to read this image as a landscape. Close inspection does reveal that a waterfall is definitely present.

Abstraction, 1911

Oil on paper on cardboard

Gift of Ione and Hudson Walker

Abstraction is a one-of-a-kind work in Hartley’s career as it reveals the ambitious young artist’s struggle to discover his style and place among the moderns. He later pursued the strong linearity and bold color seen in this experimental image, but through very different stylistic uses.

Still Life: Fruit, 1911

Oil on canvas

French artist Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) had a profound impact on many members of the artistic generation that succeeded him—Hartley included. This painting shows the artist reworking essential features of Cézanne’s art. The few simple objects of the still-life arrangement, the muted palette of colors, the tilted tabletop, and the complex interplay between two- and three-dimensional forces directly recall Cézanne’s example.

Still Life, 1912

Oil on composition board

In Still Life, Hartley wrestled with the legacy of Paul Cézanne and worked to build on the Frenchman’s pathbreaking example. Hartley saw in Cézanne’s work the quality he wanted in his own art—emotional intensity. He said of that master’s still lifes: “They are not cold studies of inanimate things, they are pulsing realizations of living substances.”

Still Life: Fruit was produced in the United States when Hartley had had limited direct exposure to Cézanne’s painting. Still Life was made a year later in Paris, after Hartley had seen a number of Cézanne’s significant works, especially those owned by expatriate American author Gertrude Stein.

Abstraction with Flowers, 1913

Oil on canvas

In Paris in 1912 and 1913, Hartley’s interest in spirituality intensified, and he began exploring mysticism as well. These interests led him to paint in a style he called “subliminal or cosmic cubism.” In Abstraction with Flowers he tried to capture on canvas his subjective subconscious“artistic expressions of mystical states [of mind],” as he put it.

Portrait, c. 1914-1915

Oil on canvas

Portrait is a complicated work with multiple layers of meaning. The painting captures the energy of the burgeoning Berlin metropolis and its ongoing spectacle of imperial military parades. The soldier’s uniform evokes the strong male culture that prevailed in Germany during the rule of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

The canvas also memorializes Hartley’s friend, and possible lover, German lieutenant Karl von Freyburg, who was killed early in World War I. Thus it both commemorates the war dead and subtly reflects Hartley’s identity as a homosexual man.

Hartley builds references to von Freyburg into this image through a set of symbols. For example, von Freyburg was awarded the Iron Cross; the medal appears at the center-bottom. Included on both sides of the central composition are the rippling black, white, and red of the German flag. The curving white stripes in the upper center represent the plumed

helmet of Germany’s imperial period. The “E,” painted in a special script, refers both to the letter sewn into the shoulder epaulette of many German army uniforms and to the artist’s original first name, Edmund. The numeral 4 represents von Freyburg’s regiment and Hartley’s Berlin house number. Various other emblems of the German military are depicted in more stylized and abstract terms.

Elsa, 1916

Oil on paper mounted on cardboard

Hartley spent the summer of 1916 in the coastal resort town of Provincetown, Massachusetts. A significant cast of characters had converged there, trying to ignore news of the war in Europe. Writers John Reed and Eugene O’Neill and painter Charles Demuth were part of the heady gathering that has since been called the Great Provincetown Summer.

On returning to the States in 1915 from Germany, a nation then the enemy of most European nations and strongly disfavored in the United States, Hartley needed quickly to abandon any hint of German imagery in his art. In this painting, he struggled to find a new subject matter and style. In the coastal setting of Provincetown, he turned first to activity in the port; the Elsa was a Danish ship moored there. A clear stylistic thread follows from Portrait to One Portrait of One Woman to Elsa, as Hartley worked to find a fresh start for his art.

One Portrait of One Woman, 1916

Oil on composition board

American author Gertrude Stein lived in Paris and befriended Hartley when he moved there in 1912. She composed a word-portrait of the artist in 1913, and he painted this symbolic portrait of her three years later. The red, white, and blue in the image refer to the national colors of Stein’s native and adopted countries, the United States and France. The central teacup represents Stein’s fondness for that beverage, and MOI (French for “me”) at the bottom edge symbolizes her renowned sense of self-importance. The arrangement, which also includes flames and an arched motif, suggests a stage set for some sort of obscure ritual. The mystical mood probably refers to Stein and Hartley’s shared respect for American philosopher William James. Hartley said that his friendship with Stein took firm hold after she lent him her copy of James’s 1902 book The Varieties of Religious Experience. In it, James claims that spiritual experience is as real, as legitimate for philosophical and scientific inquiry, as physical experience. Hartley thus celebrated beliefs he and Stein held in common by evoking a personalized religious rite in this tribute to her.

Still Life No. 9, 1917

Oil on beaverboard

Movement, No. 11, c. 1917

Oil on wood

New Mexico, c. 1918

Pastel on paper

Arroyo Hondo, Valdez, 1918

Pastel on paper

Arroyos, deep gullies and channels in arid regions that are created by intermittently flowing streams, are plentiful in the American Southwest. Hartley drew the arroyos and hills surrounding Taos years before his friend Georgia O’Keeffe became enchanted with this landscape. She first visited New Mexico in 1929 and moved there permanently in 1949.

New Mexico Landscape, 1918

Pastel on paper

The simplicity of this 1918 paste—its clear structure, bold colors, and minimal composition—remind the viewer that Hartley had just ended a four-year period of dedication to abstract art. In New Mexico he worked hard to start afresh and retool himself as a representational artist. This drawing shows how the attention to form, color, and spatial relationships that are paramount in abstract art informed Hartley’s efforts as a representational painter of landscapes.

Santos, New Mexico, 1918-1919

Oil on composition board

Hartley responded to the presence of indigenous people in New Mexico in his writing. In one essay, he asserted that “a national aesthetic consciousness is a sadly needed element in American life. . . . It is the redman that offers us the way to go.” Respecting Native Americans’ deep connection with nature and the land, he saw their culture as one American artists should emulate. But elements of Native American or Hispanic life in the Southwest do not appear frequently in Hartley’s art. This painting is one exception: Hartley rendered three santos, the Hispanic carved and painted wooden statues of Christian saints, as a still-life arrangement. The artist admired the santos collection of his friend Mabel Dodge Luhan, and she may be the muted gray figure in the background.

New Mexico Landscape, 1919

Oil on canvas

Living in New Mexico in 1918 and 1919, Hartley contributed to the new push for an unmistakably American art, championed by the artistic movement known as regionalism. His goal in New Mexico was to create forceful images of an American setting and thereby start a line of work about distinctly American characteristics. In this painting, Hartley used the landscape of the Wild West to symbolize Americanness.

New Mexico Landscape shows Hartley in the act of reimagining himself and his art. Here he performs a kind of balancing act, trying faithfully to record what he saw while also offering a singular expressiveness.

Landscape No. 8, 1919

Pastel on paper

Floral Life: Debonair, c. 1920

Oil on canvas

The three still-life paintings displayed here show Hartley experimenting with a format and style that heighten the tension between recession into depth and emphasis on the flatness of the picture plane. For instance, the flat zones of color create a strong two-dimensional effect, while the overlapping layers of objects in the image suggest three-dimensional volume.

Western Flame, 1920

Oil on canvas

Hartley painted Western Flame in New York after leaving New Mexico in November 1919. Working from memory, he took liberties—the exaggerated reds and swollen hills—that he did not exercise when he was in New Mexico with the landscape before him. Especially in his New Mexican pastels, he was “copying nature as faithfully as possible.” The point of Hartley’s expedition to the Southwest had been to build upon his recent experiments in abstract art while retraining himself to paint what he saw.

Still Life, 1923

Oil on canvas

Basket and Napkin, 1923

Oil on canvas

Three Red Fish with Lemons, 1924

Oil on canvas

Landscape, Vence, 1925-1926

Oil on canvas

Hartley went through several episodes of devotion to French painter Paul Cézanne. In 1925 Hartley moved to the area of southern France where Cézanne had lived. He later rented a house in Aix-en-Provence that had once been Cézanne’s studio. Landscape, Vence is a canvas from this period. The hillside recalls Mont St. Victoire, the most prominent subject in Cézanne’s late work. Like the Frenchman, Hartley was attempting to find a language in paint that would accurately convey his perceptual experience of the landscape. Cézanne had masterfully achieved that goal. Hartley hoped to find his own way through canvases that exhibited both immediacy and fresh stylistic discovery.

Still Life No. 14, 1926

Oil on canvas

Peasant’s Paradise, 1926-1927

Oil on canvas

Hartley returned to still-life and landscape subjects repeatedly during his career. For Hartley and other modern artists, the still life offered a neutral ground for formal experimentation. In the years after World War I, however, when a search for cultural stability took hold, the still life gained even more popularity because it offered artists a known, traditional subject matter. Hartley used the still life as a subject for his formal experimentations but in the 1920s—a period when he had left abstraction and was working in a variety of representational styles—he used this subject more traditionally.

Fleurs d’Orphée, 1928

Oil on canvas

Whale’s Jaw, Dogtown, No. 1, 1931

Black lithographic crayon on cream tracing paper

Hartley returned to more emotionally charged painting after his experiences in the Bavarian Alps in 1933 and 1934 and in the Dogtown moraine near Gloucester, Massachusetts, in 1931, 1934, and 1936. Depicted in his paintings and drawings of Dogtown is a scramble of rocks and boulders deposited by glacial movement many thousands of years ago. Hartley said the strange setting “looked like a cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge” and that it appeared as though some odd Druidic ritual might be enacted there. The massive heaped boulders, the strength of their forms, and the desolation of the site together captured Hartley’s imagination.

His paintings of this subject emphasize the solidity and brutish presence of the rocks. The austere colors and heavy paint-handling show that Hartley was no longer working to copy “nature as faithfully as possible” but was again allowing feeling for place to inform his art.

Alpspitze, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1933

Pastel on paper

Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane, 1933

Oil on canvas

Gift of Ione and Hudson Walker

Eight Bells Folly memorializes American poet Hart Crane, who was a friend of Hartley. Both had been in Mexico City in 1932 and 1933. Crane left for New York by boat and committed suicide en route by jumping overboard. Aboard ship eight bells toll at noon, the presumed hour of Crane’s death. The number 33 on the sails matches his age when he died. The numbers can also be read as two Bs: the epic poem BrooklynBridge is the writer’s best-known work and an American literary masterpiece.

The Waxenstein, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1933

Pastel on paper

Hartley spent the fall of 1933 and winter of 1934 in the Bavarian mountain village of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. There he roamed the trails and sketched the majestic scenes he observed. His experiences in this dramatic setting had a strong impact on him and initiated his return to personal feelings as a source for his art. As he explained at the time, “Never in my life have I seen such expositions of nature as are revealed here—and it is almost as if I am seeing nature all over again—and what I am doing here now is the work of the rest of my life.”

Dogtown, 1934

Oil on masonite

Dogtown, the Last of the Stone Wall, 1934

Oil on academy board

FishingVillage, 1937

Lithographic crayon and white chalk on cardboard

New England Fisherman, 1937

Black crayon on cardboard

Twice in his later years, Hartley moved to remote fishing villages along the Northeastern seacoast and boarded with local families. He celebrated the craggy fishing folk, drawing from an intimate knowledge of and deep respect for their hard labor. New England Fisherman is a quick study from this period.

Fishing Shack and Lobster Pots, 1937

Lithographic crayon and white chalk on cardboard

Hartley returned to Maine in the late 1930s. A native of the state, he took comfort in its rhythms of life. As he explained, “I am more locally moved when a load of tall timbers is passing by on a truck or a boatload of cod or haddock or mackerel is being unloaded in front of me.”

Marie Ste. Esprit, c. 1938-1939

Oil on academy board

Marie Ste. Esprit and Adelard the Drowned, Master of the “Phantom” are two in a set of paintings Hartley produced in 1938 and 1939. The works record his grief over the drowning at sea of Alty Mason, his brother Donny, and a cousin, Allan, in 1936. The preceding year, the artist had moved to a remote island village in Nova Scotia, where he took lodging with the Mason family and grew close to them. He stayed on with the family for several months after the young men died. Only in 1938 was Hartley able to confront his sense of loss by writing a prose poem and painting images of the Masons. Marie Ste. Esprit depicts Alty’s mother, Martha, in mourning black.