January 4, 1877– Marsden Hartley:
”I want to paint the livingness of appearances.”
He is one of my favorite artists from one of my favorite periods. Mardsen Hartley is one of the great artists & most intriguing figures in the art world.
He was born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877. As a teenager, Hartley moved to Cleveland to study art, already seasoned by solitude & a sense that he was gay. He had survived a childhood of Dickensian proportions: the early death of his mother, abandoned by his father & a life of poverty that forced him to leave school at 15 years old & go to work in a shoe factory. Hartley:
”My childhood was vast with terror & surprise.”
In true Dickensian fashion, Hartley was rescued as a young adult by sponsors attracted to his obvious talent & charisma. He enjoyed summer retreats in Maine, where he began a lifelong interest in literature & religious thought: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Henry James & Walt Whitman. His patrons paid for him to study at the National Academy Of Design in Manhattan. For several years he studied in NYC & painted in Maine, where depicting landscapes was his first & last great subject. In 1909 he met famed American photographer & Modern Art aficionado Alfred Stieglitz, who immediately gave him an exhibition at Stieglitz’ Gallery 291 & made him a prominent member of the special circle of American Modern Artists.
Hartley found his way to Paris in 1912. He fell in love with the hues & physicality of oil paint & absorbed the feelings & techniques of the Impressionists, Post-Impressionism & early Cubism. Hartley loved Europe & he joined Gertrude Stein’s circle of the young modern painters & he understood that Pablo Picasso was the best of the best. Indeed, he became one of the first American artists to paint in the modernist style of Picasso, Paul Klee & Wassily Kandinsky.
He also met two officers in the German Army: Arnold Rönnebeck, who was a sculptor, & Karl von Freyburg, Rönnebeck’s tall, blond cousin. They invited him to visit Berlin, which in pre-WW1 had a thriving gay scene, despite laws against homosexuality. There was also a near constant parade of the German Army officers in Berlin which Hartley loved. Berlin became his spiritual home away from home. Von Freyburg & Hartley fell in love, but tragically, von Freyburg was killed in battle in autumn, 1914. Grief stricken, Hartley created some of his greatest paintings to memorialize their love.
Hartley returned to NYC in 1915, & in late 1916 Hartley took a house together in Provincetown with artist Charles Demuth. Demuth was one of the earliest American painters to show a gay identity through explicit, yet positive depictions of desire between men. Demuth also knew his way around NYC’s gay scene, where Hartley was introduced to the lesbian writer Djuna Barnes.
Hartley returned to Europe in 1921 & tried to find a life as a writer. He published 25 Poems, issued by the English language press Contact Publishing Company in Paris. During The Great Depression, Hartley to return to the USA. He received a Guggenheim fellowship which allowed him to live in Mexico in 1932, where he began a relationship with gay poet Hart Crane, who was also there via a Guggenheim grant. On a return voyage to the USA, Crane was severely beaten after making a pass at a male crew member. Humiliated & despondent, Crane jumped overboard in the Gulf Of Mexico. Hartley painted 8 Bells Folly (1933), a surrealist tribute to Crane.
Hartley found work in NYC as part of FDR’s Workers Progress Administration (WPA) & their Public Works Of Art Project. He became friendly with the family of Francis Mason of Nova Scotia & he lived with them in a small Canadian fishing community, finally finding some happiness & inspiration in their company. But tragedy managed to find Hartley, 2 handsome, strapping sons of the Mason family were killed at sea. Deeply saddened, Hartley stayed with the Masons through that winter, never to return.
Hartley returned to Maine in 1937, after declaring that he wanted to become “The Painter Of Maine“, depicting New England life at a local level. His work was part of one of many Regionalism movements, groups of artists who to represented a distinctly American Art from different geographic points in the USA. He continued to do paintings of Maine, primarily deeply expressive scenes around the port of Lovell & the rugged coast & the fishermen who made their living there, combining thick brushstrokes & vibrant colors, until his passing in 1943, gone from a heart attack at 66 years old.
He received little recognition for his art & never made money from his work. Hartley never had a longtime romantic partner, & never really had a family. The young German soldier that he loved was killed in a war, & the virile, attractive & masculine sons of the fishing family he stayed with in Nova Scotia tragically drowned. It seems rather appropriate that Hartley created his most powerfully expressive works during his many bouts of depression spent in remote locations. His portraits of swimmers & wrestlers that he painted in Maine in the late 1930’s are among the most powerfully sensual images of men ever made. It could not have been easy to face the difficulties of being a gay artist in his era.
Hartley did seem to have an inkling that his art would live on. He wrote this near the end of his life:
“I am not a ‘book of the month’ artist, & I do not paint pretty pictures; but when I am no longer here my name will register forever in the history of American Art.”
A decade ago, Hartley’s colorful painting Lighthouse sold for $6.2 million at Christie’s. Hartley was an artist with a great love of great paintings who wanted to make his own & have them be viewed as great.
Marsden Hartley, Painting No.47, Berlin, 1914-1915, oil on canvas, 39 1/2 x 31 5/8″
(courtesy Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden).
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