HARTLEY, Marsden

HARTLEY, Marsden (b. 4 January 1877; d. 2 September 1943), artist, writer.

Edmund Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, to English immigrant working-class parents. After his mother's death when he was eight, he lived with an older sister nearby until rejoining his remarried father in 1893 in Cleveland, Ohio. There he began taking art classes, entered the Cleveland School of Art in 1898, and soon after received an annual stipend to study for five years in New York. After spending a year at the Chase School, Hartley transferred to the National Academy of Design, where he garnered several awards. At this time, he began spending summers in Maine and worked for two years as an extra in a New York theater company. Aside from his artistic studies, Hartley had no formal education beyond the age of sixteen, but he developed wide-ranging literary and intellectual interests, including a lifelong study of spiritual philosophy and mysticism.

Hartley's earliest known painting (ca. 1905) is, revealingly, a depiction of Walt Whitman's house in Camden, New Jersey; at the time, he knew several members of Whitman's circle. In 1906, Hartley moved back to Lewiston, adding his stepmother's maiden name, Marsden, to his own, then dropping Edmund entirely two years later. Moving to North Lovell, Maine, he painted a number of mountain landscapes in an impressionist style. In 1909, he was introduced to the famed New York art dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who quickly gave Hartley his first solo exhibition at his 291 Gallery and was to exhibit his works until 1937. Moving to New York, he also met the eccentric landscape painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, painting several landscapes in a similar dark style. Circulating within a wide circle of artists, writers, and patrons, Hartley imbibed much of the newest European and American art at Stieglitz's gallery and elsewhere, being particularly influenced by Pablo Picasso and Paul Cézanne.

Hartley made his first trip to Europe in 1912–1913, staying in Paris (where he was befriended by Gertrude Stein), Berlin, and Munich. He was strongly affected by his sojourn in Germany, forming important artistic ties to Wassily Kandinsky, among others, and being seduced by the relative openness of gay life in prewar Berlin, in addition to admiring the manifest military culture and pageantry. After a brief trip to New York, Hartley returned to Berlin and stayed until late 1915, a crucial period for his painting. He developed a boldly colored abstract style, most notably exhibited in the German military paintings of 1913–1914, in large part a memorial to an apparent lover, Karl von Freyburg, a young officer who was killed in October 1914. Although receiving lukewarm notice when exhibited by Stieglitz in 1916 (partly because of anti-German feeling), these works are now commonly accepted as important early exponents of American modernism. Through knowledge of Hartley's life, their encoded gay symbolism has also now been successfully elucidated.

Realizing that his advanced style did not suit the time, Hartley spent the next twenty years restlessly searching for a place and a distinctive personal vision. Never staying longer than a few months in any lodging, he sojourned, sometimes repeatedly, in Provincetown, Massachusetts (where he shared a house with the painter Charles Demuth), Bermuda, Maine, New Mexico, California, Paris, Berlin, Italy, Provence, New Hampshire, Mexico, and Bavaria. Often vacillating in his work between more literal objectivity and subjective symbolism, Hartley gradually developed a pared-down style that at once reflected the cultural taste for a more "American" representation and yet was true to his own spiritual energy. He continued to alternate periods of rural isolation with active participation in artistic and literary circles in the United States and Europe; his own poems and essays were being published in prestigious journals such as Camera Work, Dial, and Poetry. He won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1931 and spent it working in Mexico. After a last European stay in 1933, Hartley returned to New York and a period of severe financial hardship during the Great Depression before finally settling for good in New England.

Hartley was considerably reenergized by his experiences living with a fishing family in 1935–1936 on the coast of Nova Scotia, reworking earlier painting motifs, exploring the harsh environment, and enjoying the idealized comfort of a domestic life. He became particularly attached to the young son of the family, Aldy Mason, whose drowning in September 1936 deeply affected him. Excepting brief stays in New York, he spent the rest of his life in Maine. In addition to painting powerful depictions of the rocky coast and Mount Katahdin, Hartley devoted himself significantly to figure painting, including archaic depictions of the Mason family in Fishermen's Last Supper and the homoerotic Christ Held by Half-Naked Men of 1940–1941; homages to Abraham Lincoln and Albert Pinkham Ryder; and portrayals of handsome local lobstermen, boxers, and swimmers. Such supermasculine figures as Madawaska–Acadian Light-Heavy (1940) almost flagrantly represent Hartley's desires, yet ironically during wartime also were able to symbolize for the public an unthreatening ideal of manhood, indeed winning for him a 1942 purchase prize from the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition "Artists for Victory." It was only in the last two years of his life that Hartley began to receive wide recognition again and to achieve more significant sales of his work. He died in Ellsworth, Maine, in 1943.

Hartley always maintained a delicate balance between openness and discretion in his life and art. Somewhat of a dandy in appearance and sophisticated tastes, he remained coy about his personal affairs, apparently including at least one heterosexual liaison. Freely participating in gay society from 1913 Berlin to 1942 New York (where he was photographed by George Platt Lynes), he also retained to the end of his life such telling souvenirs as a signed photograph of Whitman, along with a private stock of nude photographs and physique magazines. Barbara Haskell's catalog for the 1980 Whitney Museum retrospective was the first mainstream recognition of Hartley's homosexuality, followed by more indepth explorations by Townsend Ludington, Jonathan Weinberg, and others.

Bibliography

Hartley, Marsden. Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley. Edited by Susan Elizabeth Ryan. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997.

Haskell, Barbara. Marsden Hartley. New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1980.

Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin, ed. Marsden Hartley. Hartford, Conn.: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, 2002.

Ludington, Townsend. Marsden Hartley: The Biography of an American Artist. Rev. ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.

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

David P. Becker

see alsodemuth, charles; lynes, george platt; stein, gertrude, and alice b. toklas; visual art; whitman, walt.