An American Back from Paris. (Books).

Marsden Hartley: Man of the World, Painter from Maine

Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT

Marsden Hartley Catalogue of the Exhibition

Edited by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser Yale Univ. Press. 334 pages, $55.

The following is based upon the author's entry i,i GLBTQ.com, an on-line encyclopedia.

A CENTRAL FIGURE in the evolution of modern American art, Marsden Hartley was also among a handful of gay and lesbian artists who came to define the delicate balance between the poetic and the erotic in the early days of the American avant-garde. Hartley's considerable gifts as an artist (he was also a noted essayist) are on display in the first Marsden Hartley retrospective in over twenty years. Organized by the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, the exhibit is comprised of 85 paintings and twenty works on paper, which together represent each important stage of the artist's creative life.

Born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1877, his given name was Edmund Hartley. His mother died when he was only eight years old, an event that may have haunted him through his entire life. Certainly death was to be the subject of many of his most memorable paintings. In 1889, four years after the demise of his mother, Hartley's father married Martha Marsden, whose maiden name the painter would adopt as his first name in 1906. From 1898 to 1904, Hartley studied at the Cleveland School of Art, the New York School of Art, and the National Academy of Design. In 1909, he landed his first major exhibition, which showed at Alfred Stieglitz's highly respected New York gallery, Gallery 291. He exhibited there again in 1912, the same year in which, like so many artists of his generation, he made a pilgrimage to Paris. There he met the well-known art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein.

In 1913 Hartley visited Berlin and Munich, where he met artists Franz Marc and Vassily Kandinsky. While in Germany he was drawn to the extravagant military parades he saw, and began a series of abstract paintings, the first of which was exhibited in the 1913 Armory show in New York. Even after the outbreak of World War I in the following year, Hartley continued to live in Germany. It was only after the death of his close friend, a young German soldier named Karl von Freyburg, that he returned to the U.S.

Hartley's famous Portrait of a German Officer (1914) includes abstracted versions of von Freyburg's initials and his own. The painting, in which German military regalia are arranged to suggest a body, is both a memorial to Hartley's friend and an expression of forbidden desire. In recent years, art critics (notably Jonathan Weinberg) have analyzed these colorful, complex paintings and shown that there is an overt homosexual content in the entire war motif series. Widely interpreted as sending a pro-German message, however, Hartley's paintings of the Axis military machine were not well received in New York. To this day, the artist's fascination with military themes continues to be a topic of debate, as is the nature of his relationship with von Freyburg.

By 1919 Hartley had discontinued not only the war series but his use of abstraction as well. In the following years he would do many still lifes, landscapes, and figure studies. It wasn't until the late 1930's that he returned to the masculine subject (although in 1933 he painted another memorial work, Eight Bells Folly, dedicated to his friend Hart Crane, the gay poet who committed suicide at sea). Moving first to Nova Scotia and then back to Maine in 1935, he began a period of figurative painting that would yield some of his most explicitly homoerotic works. In this period he also renewed his earlier fascination with individual subjectivity, exploring American transcendentalism and Jamesian empiricism through the everyday scenes of a fishing village. The works from this period employ a crude realism closer to American Regionalism than to modernist abstraction.

In this style, Hartley created one of his strongest images in Adelard the Drowned, Master of the "Phantom" (1938-39). Based on the death of his close friend Alty Mason, the painting is a touching portrait. Seated with hands crossed, Mason's open shirt and rugged form are softened by a single white flower placed at his temple. Another portrait in the same series is Christ Held by Half-Naked Men (1940-41), an all-male pieta in which Mason is presented both as a Christ-figure and an object of desire. Hartley's exact relationship to Mason and to other subjects of his paintings is open to speculation, but his apparent closet-edness must be placed in the context of the growing homophobia of American culture in the 1930's and 40's, a time when homosexual behavior was increasingly being criminalized.

The Hartford exhibit--which will also travel to Washington and to Kansas City--attests to Hartley's perpetual self-reinvention over four decades as he went from style to style, always "navigating between abstraction and realism," in the words of exhibit curator Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser. "The distance of time allows us a deeper understanding of Marsden Hartley's persisting quality and originality," Kornhauser points out with justice. Time has also permitted a fairer appraisal of the unmistakable homoerotic elements in his work, which for his own reasons had to be expressed in subtle ways.

Please note: The exhibit at the Wadsworth Athenaeum, which curated the show, ended last April. However, the Hartley exhibit can still be seen at the following two locales: The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, June 7-Sept. 7, 2003; and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Mo., Oct. 11, 2003-Jan. 4, 2004

On the Cover: Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine (1940-41). Oil on masonite-type hardboard. 40-1/8" x 30". Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Reprinted with permission.

Ken Gonzales-Day, a Los Angeles-based artist and writer who teaches at Scripps College, has contributed to numerous periodicals, art journals, and exhibition catalogues.