Marsden Hartley
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MARSDEN HARTLEY had a great and late triumph: in his last decade he forged a life's work into a unified whole. It was combined from elements unusually discordant and contradictory, even for our times, and the tensions mastered and controlled are the driving force in his work. Superficially he was an artist caught in the nineteenth-century dilemma, the choice between the European tradition and the American adventure. He travelled widely, endlessly; it was half search, half flight. He was caught between gregariousness and need of solitude, between paint and a desire to write, between sophisticated sensibilities and respect for the far simpler people from whom he came. He came home from his migrations to his native Maine, his world-education matured, able to build such paintings as The Wave or Mt. Katahdins-on bedrock, out of the Maine elementals of water, rock, sea and sky.
He seems to have been faced by some deeper, Whitmanesque choice of loving either himself or humanity as a whole, and he achieved a synthesis even here in paintings such as The Lost Felice or Fishermen's Last Supper, which are religious events.
Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1877, spent his later boyhood in Ohio, came to study art in New York (with Chase among others) and was back in Maine by 1901. The "black paintings" with which he began were influenced by the American painter-mystic, Albert Pinkham Ryder, whose massive glacial clouds were to stay for good in Hartley's skies. Stieglitz, the impresario of the new, showed Hartley in New York in 1909; three years later he and Arthur B. Davies (of Armory Show fame) combined to send Hartley to Europe. The painter met Gertrude Stein and saw the new world of cubism in Paris, but he elected to go to Munich and join Franz Marc. Bold patterns built out of literary symbolism now related his work to the Blue Rider Group; he stayed on in Berlin into the first World War.
He returned to New England, then explored the West --his European patterns becoming something as American as a Navaho blanket with astonishingly little change. More than a decade of restless travel began. Berlin again, Paris, the South of France where he felt the influence of Cézanne and brought a new discipline and severity into his work. Then London, America again, Mexico, and once more Berlin. Betweenwhiles New England persisted as a center of gravity and strengthened its hold upon him. He explored the coast from Gloucester to Nova Scotia, and for the last ten years settled, like Marin, for alternations of Maine and New York: the metropolis in the winter, Bangor in the summer.
His style, as it came into the clear, was both linear and massive, diagrammatic, austere, and consciously crude. His subjects: landscapes, still lifes, and a couple of portraits of presiding geniuses--Albert Pinkham Ryder and Abraham Lincoln. The painting is bleak and arctic even when the color is strong. Curiously, dropping the emotional temperature seems to have permitted Hartley a release of power.
Hartley: My feeling is: of what use is a painting which. does not realize its esthetical problem? Underlying all sensible works of art, there must be somewhere in evidence the particular problem understood. It was so with those artists of the great past who had the intellectual knowledge of structure upon which to place their emotions. It is this structural beauty that makes the old painting valuable. And so it becomes to me--a problem. I would rather be sure that I had placed two colors in true relationship to each other than to have exposed a wealth of emotionalism gone wrong in the name of richness of personal expression.
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