Marsden Hartley

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Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 - September 2, 1943) was an American painter and poet in the early 20th century. Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, USA. He began his art training at the Cleveland Art Institute after moving to Cleveland, Ohio in 1892. At the age of 22, he moved to New York City where he attended the National Academy of Design and studied painting with William Merritt Chase. While in New York, he came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and became associated with Stieglitz' Gallery 291 Group. He was in the cultural vanguard, in the same milieu as Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keefe, Fernand Leger, Ezra Pound, among many others. His painting Portrait of a German Officer [1] (1914), was an ode to Karl von Freyburg, a Prussian lieutenant with whom he became enamored before his death in World War I.

Portrait of a German Officer 1914

Marsden Hartley was a nomadic painter for much of his life, but after spending many years away from his native state, he returned to Maine towards 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 20th century that attempted to represent a distinctly "American art"

Hartley is an icon among painters. He is considered one of the foremost American painters of the first half of the 20th century. He was also a fine poet, essayist and writer. His written work continues to resonate with us today.

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 home he had been seeking since his unhappy childhood in Maine. The impact of this rich experience lasted until his death in 1943, widening the scope of his mature work which included numerous portrayals of the Masons, of whom he wrote: "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‘s 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.

[edit] 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
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.