by Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker

 

Portrait of Marsden Hartley, by Alfred Stieglitz, 1913-15, gelatin platinum print

 

February 3, 2003

 

Marsden Hartley was a great artist whose greatness is of a piece with the provincial clumsiness of American high culture in the early twentieth century. A strong Hartley retrospective that has opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, where it will remain until April 20th, confirms the lasting grandeur of the Yankee modernist, who stands in the history of modern art like an increasingly unavoidable, bumpy detour. At different points in his career (he died in 1943, at the age of sixty-six), Hartley was inspired by French masters, primarily Cézanne, and by German Expressionists, notably the Blue Rider group, which included Wassily Kandinsky. He adored Germany and had extended stays in Berlin. He participated in the fast-track salons of his day: Gertrude Stein's in Paris, Alfred Stieglitz's in New York, Eugene O'Neill's in Provincetown, and Mabel Dodge Luhan's in New Mexico. A secretive homosexual, he was, in his later years, part of an elegant gay scene that formed around the photographer George Platt Lynnes in New York. He fit in nowhere. Solitude owned him.

 

Painting, Number 5, 1914-5, oil on canvas

 

In retrospect, Hartley's best art—made in Berlin from 1913 to 1915, and especially in Maine, starting in the mid-nineteen-thirties—looms so far above the works of such celebrated contemporaries as Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, and John Marin that it poses the question of how his achievement was even possible. Like Edward Hopper, a very different painter and Hartley's only equal in their generation, he possessed a self-reliant temperament that pitted gritty American resources against the intimidating authority of European art. The utter freshness of the Hartford show—even apart from the presence of unfamiliar gems that have been turned up by the curator, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser—marks Hartley as both an ethical and an aesthetic hero. Beauty comes and goes in his work, but intuitions of truth are constant. Hartley's work confronts the viewer with the question: Do you live in a way commensurate with such honesty?

 

Storm Clouds, Maine, 1906-07

Hartley was fabulously ugly, in an Abraham Lincoln way; a big man, he had a long face that joined a high dome, deep-set eyes under sloping brows, a huge nose, and, over all, the look of an extraordinarily intelligent hound dog. In photographs, his gaze is often worried but always firm: he stood his ground. He was born Edmund Hartley in Lewiston, Maine, the youngest of eight children of English immigrants. His father worked in the cotton mills. After his mother died, when he was eight, his father remarried and moved the family to Cleveland, where Hartley studied at the Cleveland School of Art and became devoted to the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. (The earliest painting in the show is a brooding little picture, dated 1905, of Whitman's house in Camden, New Jersey.) In 1899, Hartley came to New York, and worked his way through Impressionist, Neo-Impressionist, and Fauvist styles ("Storm Clouds, Maine," from 1906-07, is a serendipitous marvel). He imbibed spiritualist ideas, and met and was influenced by Albert Pinkham Ryder. He also took on his stepmother's maiden name, Marsden. In 1912, he set off for Europe.

 

 

The heraldic semi-abstractions that Hartley made in Berlin in the years before and after the onset of the First World War are such icons of modern style that, seeing them one at a time, I have sometimes tired of them. Their conjunction of jazzy Cubist composition and rough Expressionist handling can have the air of textbook demonstrations performed with forced high spirits. The panache of the pictures that are dedicated to Hartley's lover Karl von Freyburg, a German soldier who was killed early in the war, strikes a weirdly manic tone of mourning.

 

Portrait of One Woman (Gertrude Stein), 1916

 

The Hartford show has rejuvenated my appreciation of these works. Seen in quantity, they disarm the viewer with the restless variety of their formal invention. Berlin liberated Hartley artistically and sexually. His sorrow at the loss of von Freyburg, of whom little is known, only amplified his gratitude to the man. In the paintings that display the initials "Kv.F," the artist used his gifts to resuscitate the fallen hero, whose emotional presence Hartley would not let dissipate. This intention is felt in the almost violent compression of these works, in which all the elements go bang! simultaneously, without flying apart. Nothing else in that epoch of applied Cubism—think of the airy expansiveness of a Robert Delaunay—really compares. In Berlin, Hartley did something new that has stayed new.

 

Landscape Vence, 1925-1926

 

In 1915, the political pressures of the war forced Hartley to return to New York. Because of the apparently pro-German nature of his paintings, with their military symbols, including von Freyburg's posthumously awarded Iron Cross, his reception in artistic circles was chilly. He entered upon nearly two decades of wandering, both geographically and artistically. Uncertainty plagues his lovely but brittle Cubist still-lifes, his Cézannesque landscapes, and, here and there in different genres, a cultivation of bulky forms, outlined in black, that steer increasingly close to the style of Max Beckmann. (Parallels between Hartley and Beckmann, though barely mentioned in the Wadsworth's formidable catalogue, seem an obvious, rich field for future study.) Sojourns in Mexico and the Bavarian Alps contributed to the mature flowering of Hartley's talent. He developed a sense of mystical immanence in desert landscapes and a tactile appreciation of the contours of rocks and mountains. (He once declared, "As a painter, I have to have a mountain.") His paintings of a woebegone hamlet, delectably named Dogtown, inland from Gloucester, Massachusetts, mark a turning point. Hartley visited the place many times, producing works that distill lonesome ecstasies of communion with subjects that he had all to himself, if only because no one else would have noticed them.

 

Along the way, he made what I regard as the world's best bad painting, "Eight Bells Folly, Memorial for Hart Crane" (1933)—a farrago of crude, private symbols jammed together as if their shelf life were about to expire. Crane, the seraphic, desperately ambitious, miserable homosexual poet, who committed suicide in 1932 by throwing himself off a ship in the Caribbean, was a natural subject of identification for Hartley, whose description of his own painting is worth quoting. It exemplifies his odd spirit of soberly deliberated abandon: "There is a ship foundering—a sun, a moon, two triangles, clouds—a shark pushing up out of the mad waters—and at the right corner—a bell with '8' on it—symbolizing eight bells—or noon when he jumped off—and around the bell are a lot of men's eyes—that look up from below to see who the new lodger is to be." There is much more, including numerological folderol concerning the figures 2, 9, and 33. But the whole is infectiously wild, with frothing paint in resonant deep blues. Once you start looking at it, you may find it absurdly difficult to stop. Defiantly over the top, this cacophonous work suggests an effort literally to wake the dead.

 

Abstraction with Flowers, 1913, oil on canvas

 

Death was Hartley's most efficacious muse. Having memorialized von Freyburg and Crane, he became deeply engaged by the deaths of three members of a Nova Scotia fishing family—two brothers and a cousin—who drowned in 1936. The naïve-looking style of Hartley's paintings of the Masons is one of the most successful feats of modern, self-conscious primitivism. In one of two paintings in the show, entitled "Fishermen's Last Supper," the doomed brothers are depicted with asterisk-like stars over their heads, as they sit at table with their parents and sister. Hartley wrote, in an elegiac poem about the tragedy, "For Wine, they drank the ocean— / for bread, they ate their own despairs. . . ." His idealizing of the Masons had an erotic aspect. He had written a fierce love poem to one of the sons, Alty, including these lines: "Hair stood on end like fury-fire / mouth blowing steam of thick desire / we will go, you will go, you will / not go, without me." It seems that in the pain of loss Hartley touched the bedrock of his feelings.

Hartley's last years, which were spent primarily in Maine, are a poetic adventure of art and place comparable to that of Gauguin in the South Seas or Monet at Giverny. Hartley percolated down into himself and perfected a rugged, often dark but always glowing style of understated symbolism. (After Beckmann, that style may be considered the foremost late advance of modern Expressionism.) His sexuality is apparent in his grave renderings of taciturn, hunky fishermen and athletes—with blocky pectorals, huge nipples, and sprays of body hair that are like semaphores of fascination—but their rapt tone is hardly different from that of his seascapes and still-lifes. Like Whitman, Hartley grew into an easy oneness with the real, in all its guises. You always recognize a late Hartley immediately—you feel it as a complete, solid, wise thing almost before you see it.

 

"This is no book; who touches this, touches a man," Whitman wrote, and it is impossible to judge Hartley fairly without entering into that kind of emotional contract with his paintings. His obdurate romanticism made him a marginal case in histories of modern art that were keyed to stylistic movements and formal innovations. (In the forties, Clement Greenberg wrote appreciatively of Hartley's manner while remaining testily wary of his subject matter.) Like other great modern individualists—Edvard Munch, Beckmann, Hopper, Balthus—Hartley profits today from a long condescension that has only preserved the shock of his singularity. The Dogtown master is having his day.

 

Arroyo Hondo, Valdez, 1918, pastel on paper

 

Indian Fantasy, 1914, oil on canvas

 

 

Still Life, Fruit and Goblet

 

Dogtown, 1934

 

Fruit Basket, 1923
 

Pears in a Basket, 1923

 

Flowers in Goblet #2, 1923

 

Mountains in Armisch, 1933

 

Man Felling Tree, 1908

 

Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1933

 

Still Life of Roses, 1943

 

Trees #8, 1927

Sea View -- Starfish, New England, 1934

 

Intellectual Niece, 1939

 

City Point, Vinalhaven, 1937

 

Walt Whitman's House, 328 Mickie St., Camden, N.J., 1905

 

Desertion, 1910

 

Mountains, #19, 1930, oil on canvas

 

Down East Young Blades, ca. 1940, oil on masonite-type hardboard

 

American Indian Symbols, 1914

 

Finnish-Yankee Wrestler, oil on academy board

 

Calla Lilies in a Vase, 1928

 

A Nice Time, 1916, oil on canvas

 

Sail Movement, 1916, oil on panel

 

New Mexico Landscape, oil on canvas, 1919

 

Western Flame, 1920, oil on canvas

 

Our Washerwoman's Family-New Mexico, c. 1918, oil on canvas

 

 

New Mexico Recollection, ca. 1923, oil on canvas

 

The Iron Cross, 1915, oil on canvas

 

Mountains in Stone, Dogtown, 1931

 

Mount Katahdin, 1942, oil on masonite-type hardboard

 

 

Rocks, Dogtown

 

Portrait of a German Officer (homage to his lover, Karl von Frey - burg, who was killed in World War I), 1914

 

Finnish Sauna

 

After the Storm, Vinalhaven, 1938-39

 

Still life with Anthurium

 

New Mexico Landscape, c. 1921-1923, oil on board

 

Musical Theme (Oriental Symphony), 1912-13, oil on canvas

 

New Mexico Recollections No. 12, oil on canvas, 1922-23

 

"E", 1915

 

 

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