Marsden Hartley

Personal

Born Edmund Hartley, January 4, 1877, in Lewiston, ME; died September 2, 1943, of a heart ailment in Ellsworth, ME; son of Thomas (a cotton spinner and theater bill-poster) and Eliza Jane (Horbury) Hartley. Education: Attended Cleveland Institute of Art, 1892; attended William Merritt Chase School, New York, NY, 1898-99, and National Academy of Design, 1900; studied privately with John Semon. Hobbies and other interests: Traveling.

Career

Painter and poet.

Writings

Adventures in the Arts; Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets, Boni & Liveright (New York, NY), 1921, reprinted, Hacker Art Books (New York, NY), 1972.

Twenty-five Poems, Contact (Paris, France), 1923.

Androscoggin, Falmouth Publishing House (Portland, ME), 1940.

Sea Burial, Leon Tebbetts Editions (Portland, ME), 1941.

Selected Poems, Viking (New York, NY), 1945.

Eight Poems and One Essay, Bates College (Lewiston, ME), 1976.

On Art, edited and introduced by Gail R. Scott, Horizon Press (New York, NY), 1982.

Heart's Gate: Letters between Marsden Hartley and Horace Traubel, 1906-1915, edited by William Innes Homer, Jargon Society (Highlands, NC), 1982.

The Collected Poems of Marsden Hartley, edited by Gail R. Scott, Black Sparrow Press (Santa Rosa, CA), 1987.

Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, edited and with an introduction by Susan Elizabeth Ryan, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1996.

My Dear Stieglitz: Letters of Marsden Hartley and Alfred Stieglitz, 1912-1915, edited by James Timothy Voorhies, University of South Carolina (Columbia, SC), 2002.

Contributor of poems to literary magazines, including Poetry, Little Review, Others, Contact, and Dial.

Sidelights

Marsden Hartley was a prolific painter whose most acclaimed works depict the coast of Maine and the rugged fishermen who lived and worked there during

Hartley's lifetime. Widely acknowledged as being among the finest of American artists, he also won esteem for his poetry, and moved in a circle of influential twentieth-century artists and writers, including William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein.

A Lonely Childhood

Hartley's parents were born in Staleybridge, Lancashire, England, but had immigrated to Maine in 1857. His father found work only sporadically, and his mother also worked to try to support the family. She died when Hartley was eight years old, an event that devastated the young boy; as an adult, death would often be the subject of many of his most striking works. Four years after his mother's death, Hartley's father married Martha Marsden, another immigrant from Staleybridge. While Hartley had been christened Edmund Hartley, he adopted his stepmother's maiden name as his own. As a teen living a somewhat secluded rural life, he found great solace in the flowers, mountains, and seascapes of Maine, and at the age of thirteen he made a series of drawings for a local naturalist. By the age of fourteen, Hartley had left school and begun working in a shoe factory. Meanwhile, his father moved to Cleveland, leaving his son behind in the care of an older sister.

In 1892, the fifteen-year-old Hartley went west to be reunited with his family. Once in Cleveland, he began work in the office of a marble quarry. Continuing his education, as well as his art, in 1898, he won a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art, where he studied under Nina Waldeck and Cullen Yates. He later went on to the New York School of Art, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League. During this period his teachers included William Merritt Chase, Frank Vincent DuMond, George Maynard, and Edgar M. Ward, and he also became acquainted with many in the social circle surrounding poet Walt Whitman; Hartley's earliest extant painting is of Whitman's house in Camden, New Jersey. One of the most pivotal events of his school years occurred when a teacher gave Hartley a collection of essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson. He was so captivated by Emerson's writing that he carried the volume with him almost constantly, and read it daily, for the next five years. During this period, he alternated busy winters in New York with solitary summers at remote locations in his home state of Maine.

As a young man Hartley was troubled by many insecurities, and in 1905, he slid into a deep depression. During this time he painted a series of canvases depicting suicidal themes. This period in his work then gave way to one in which he did small, impressionistic mountain landscapes. Frequent

[Image not available for copyright reasons]

stylistic changes such as these would mark Hartley's entire career. In 1909 he had his first major art exhibition at Gallery 291, a New York gallery owned by noted photographer Alfred Stieglitz. Included in the show were Hartley's brooding Maine seascapes. Approval from Stieglitz gained the young artist entry into the artistic elite of the day, which included such influential figures as Alfred Mauer, Max Weber, and Arthur Dove. From such companions he was exposed to European trends in modern art. In 1912 he had a second exhibition at Gallery 291, and in that year he also traveled to Paris, where he met Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, and other emigré writers at Stein's salon. When Stein visited Hartley's studio to look at his paintings, she declared that she would hang his work among her Picasso and Matisse paintings.

Hartley soon moved on from Paris to Berlin, and inspired by the powerful images in Germany's military and industrial cultures, he began including them in his art. A series of works with war motifs followed, including one of his most famous paintings, Portrait of a German Officer. This was a memorial to a German soldier named Karl von Freyburg, who was a friend and possibly a romantic interest of Hartley's. However, not surprisingly, in the wake of World War I, Hartley's German-influenced work was not well received in New York. Although he continued to paint, he also traveled abroad throughout the 1920s and much of the 1930s, and it was during this time that he began to reveal his literary talents.

From Art to Poetry

The book Adventures in the Arts features Hartley's essays on a wide range of topics. Published in 1921, it contains the well-traveled artist's thoughts on such diverse topics as the declining popularity of acrobats, Walt Whitman and Paul Cezanne, and modern art in America. In 1923 Hartley released Twenty-five Poems. This chapbook features a poetic style that, in the words of Joel Lewis in the American Book Review, showcase Hartley's "absorption of the new, Cubist-inspired poetics of Williams, Mina Loy, and Walter Arensberg." Hartley continued to publish the occasional poem in journals, but he did not release another collection until 1940. That year, Androscoggin was published to favorable reviews.

By this time in his life, the road-weary Hartley was again creating art that celebrated his native land of Maine. In the aesthetic spirit of the Objectivists, Hartley's poetry also gave voice to the natural world. In the poem "Return of the Native," for example, Hartley embraces the rugged landscape of

[Image not available for copyright reasons]

Maine. Sea Burial, another chapbook featuring work drawn from the author's home region, was published in 1941. Hartley died two years later of heart failure, and his ashes were scattered into the Androscoggin River. He told his own story posthumously in Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley. According to Bob Roehr, writing in the Lambda Book Report, "Somehow a Past is most successful when Hartley writes of the profession of art, not his own work on which he is near completely silent, but of the works of artists who have affected him, Cezanne and Piero della Francesca in particular. His account of time in Mexico on a fellowship (1932) is also masterful, perhaps because it was closest to the time of his writing the first draft of this work." Roehr found Hartley's memoir too reserved, but stated that, despite this flaw, "The poet in Hartley could be a very skilled writer, and there are passages of the autobiography that are a joy to read for their sheer use of language."

Though he was recognized as an artistic force during his lifetime, appreciation for Hartley's cultural contributions increased to new levels in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1982, Gail R. Scott produced On Art, a book that collects Hartley's writings and provides glimpses into his personal feelings on art and the social scenes of his time. In 1987, Scott edited The Collected Poems of Marsden Hartley. A contributor to Christian Science Monitor declared that there "is a melody in Hartley's poems … a solitary tune mingling with the strains created by American poets as they celebrate the vast silences and solitude of their native land."

If you enjoy the works of Marsden Hartley

If you enjoy the works of Marsden Hartley, you may also want to check out the following:

The paintings of Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), Albert Pinkham Ryder (1847-1917), and Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899), who were major influences on Hartley.

Assessing Hartley's literary significance in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Robert K. Martin mused that the poet "never lost his Thoreau-like ability to capture the precise details of a scene." Martin further observed that "true to his transcendentalist heritage, he was also always tempted to 'read' the scene and find its meaning." While reflecting that "Hartley the poet is now almost completely forgotten," Martin praised Hartley's poetic contributions, particularly his "use of the sea and its rhythms," which "provided him with a means for the recognition of death and human tragedy. The strength that he derived from his immersion in life is reflected in the hard lines and bold forms of these poems that seem to echo the sharp objectivity of his painting. Not, surely, as important a poet as a painter, he remains a voice in modern American poetry that is worth rediscovering."

Biographical and Critical Sources

books

Dictionary of Contemporary American Artists, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 54: American Poets, 1880-1945, Third Series, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1987.

Encyclopedia of World Biography, 2nd edition, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Gay and Lesbian Literature, 2nd edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Haskell, Barbara, Marsden Hartley, Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), 1980.

Kornhauser, Elizabeth, Marsden Hartley: American Modernist, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2003.

Ludington, Townsend, editor, Marsden Hartley: The Biography of An American Artist, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1992.

Ludington, Townsend, Seeking the Spiritual: The Paintings of Marsden Hartley, Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), 1998.

MacCausland, Elizabeth, Marsden Hartley, University of Minnesota Press (Minneapolis, MN), 1952.

Robertson, Bruce, Marsden Hartley, Abrams (New York, NY), 1995.

Ryan, Susan Elizabeth, editor, Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 1996.

Turner, Elizabeth Hutton, In the American Grain: Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Alfred Stieglitz : The Stieglitz Circle at the Phillips Collection, Counterpoint, 1995.

Weinberg, Jonathan Edman, Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avante-Garde, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1993.

periodicals

Advocate, April 1, 2003, David Ehrenstein, "Confessions of a Modernist Mind," p. 66.

American Book Review, September-October, 1987, p. 7.

Art in America, March, 1983, p. 17; November, 2003, Robert Berlind, "Hartley's Indicative Objects," p. 148.

Chicago Tribune, June 26, 2003, Michael Kilian, "Phillips Features Controversial Modernist Marsden Hartley."

Christian Science Monitor, January 18, 1941, p. 11; July 3, 1987, p. B3.

Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide, July-August, 2003, Ken Gonzales-Day, "An American Back from Paris," p. 37.

Insight on the News, July 22, 2003, Stephen Goode, "Hartley's Talent," p. 36.

Lambda Book Report, March, 1997, Ulysses D'Aquila, review of Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley, p. 20; October, 1998, Bob Roehr, review of Somehow a Past, p. 23.

Library Journal, January, 2003, Eric Linderman, review of My Dear Stieglitz: Letters of Marsden Hartley and Alfred Stieglitz, 1912-1915, p. 101.

Magazine of Art, November, 1948, Donald Gallup, "Weaving of a Pattern: Marsden Hartley and Gertrude Stein," pp. 256-261.

New Criterion, March, 2003, James Panero, "Marsden Hartley and American Modernism," p. 49.

New England Quarterly, December, 1958, Robert Burlingame, "Marsden Hartley's Androscoggin: Return to Place," pp. 447-462.

Newsweek, April 14, 1980, p. 109.

New York, March 31, 1980, p. 73; December 6, 1982, p. 154.

New Yorker, December 29, 1945, p. 68; February 3, 2003, Peter Schjeldahl, "The Searcher," p. 93.

New York Times, May 7, 2000, Helen A. Harrison, "Through His Drawings, Hartley's Delicate Side," p. 22; May 30, 2003, Grace Glueck, "The Heart of the Matter—The Still Lifes of Marsden Hartley," p. E36.

New York Times Book Review, December 22, 1996, p. 22.

Publishers Weekly, December 2, 1996, review of Somehow a Past, p. 48.

Quarterly Review of Literature, winter, 1944, Henry W. Wells, "The Poetry of Marsden Hartley," pp. 100-106.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, February 4, 2005, Regina Hackett, "Hartley Collection Traces the Career of a Modern Pioneer," p. 16.

Seattle Times, January 16, 2005, Sheila Farr, "An American Original," p. K1.

Time, July 14, 1980, p. 68.*