Marsden Hartley: American Modernist($384.14Value)

Description

Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) was a painter, poet, writer, and pioneer of American modernism. Born in Lewiston, Maine, he lived a peripatetic life, working in Paris, Berlin, New York, Mexico, New Mexico, Bermuda, and elsewhere before returning to Maine in 1934. This superbly illustrated book encompasses the extraordinary range and depth of Hartley's creative output. Some one-hundred and five of his works - landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and abstract paintings - demonstrate the visual power for which Hartley gained acclaim as well as the development of his art over the course of his thirty-five year career. The book gathers together the most recent scholarship on Hartley's work, discussing such topics as the artist's working methods, his self-portraits, the influence of Cezanne on his work, and Hartley's attitudes toward Native Americans. A chronology of his life is included, and each painting is accompanied by a full catalogue entry. This book also serves as the catalogue of an exhibition organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art and traveling to the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City. It was Marsden Hartley's misfortune to be a leading American artist whose heart was in the wrong place at the wrong time. A gay man from small-town New England who was enchanted by the urban pleasures of Berlin, he developed a personal symbolism based on German military imagery--on the eve of World War I. A mystically inclined modernist whose paintings grew increasingly stark and bleak, he was overshadowed by popular and critical taste for sunny Americana. In Marsden Hartley , insightful essays by 10 scholars illuminate aspects of the artist's life and work. Wanda Corn explains how the German taste for stereotypical depictions of Native Americans influenced Hartley’s vividly patterned "Amerika" paintings. Amy Ellis discusses the influence of playwright Eugene O’Neill, whom the artist--who also wrote poetry and essays--befriended in 1916 and whose tragic sense of life he came to share. Two decades later, after three members of a fishing family he knew died at sea, Hartley would paint a powerful series of stylized portraits. Bruce Robertson explores a remarkable self-portrait from 1939 ("Sustained Comedy"), in which arrows pierce the artist's eyes and open doors on the artist's chest reveal the crucified Christ. Other contributors write about Hartley's relationship with New England and with homoerotic culture. More than 200 illustrations, the majority in color, display the elemental vigor that makes Hartley an American original. The book accompanies an exhibition held at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (through September 7, 2003) and at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri. (October 11, 2003 to January 11, 2004). —Cathy Curtis Published in association with the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser is deputy director, chief curator, and Krieble Curator of American Painting and Sculpture at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT. She is co-curator of the Marsden Hartley exhibit.