Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 - September 2, 1943) was an American
Modernist painter and poet in the early 20th century.Marsden Hartley (January 4,
1877 - September 2, 1943) was an American Modernist painter and poet in the
early 20th century.
Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 - September 2, 1943) was an American
Modernist painter and poet in the early 20th century. Hartley was born in
Lewiston, Maine, USA. He began his art training at the Cleveland Institute of
Art after moving to Cleveland, Ohio in 1892.
New York City
At the age of 22, he moved to New York City, where he attended the National
Academy of Design and studied painting with William Merritt Chase. A great
admirer of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Hartley would visit Ryder's studio in Greenwich
Village as often as possible. While in New York, he came to the attention of
Alfred Stieglitz and became associated with Stieglitz' 291 Gallery Group. He was
in the cultural vanguard, in the same milieu as Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane,
Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Fernand Leger, Ezra Pound, among many others.
Hartley, who was gay,[1] painted Portrait of a German Officer[2] (1914), which
was an ode to Karl von Freyburg, a Prussian lieutenant of whom he became
enamored before von Freyburg's death in World War I.
Travels
Marsden Hartley traveled throughout the USA and Europe in the early years of the
20th century. Considered an early modernist, Hartley was a nomadic painter for
much of his life. He painted from Maine to Massachusetts, in New Mexico,
California, New York and Western Europe. Finally, after spending many years away
from his native state, he returned to Maine toward the end of his life. He
wanted to become "the painter of Maine" and depict American life at a local
level. In this way, he is a member of the regionalists, a group of artists from
the early to mid 20th century that attempted to represent a distinctly "American
art."
Hartley is an icon among painters. He is considered one of the foremost American
painters of the first half of the 20th century. He was also a fine poet,
essayist and writer. His written work continues to resonate.
Cleophas and His Own: A North Atlantic Tragedy is a story based on two periods
he spent in 1935 and 1936 with the Mason family in the Lunenburg County, Nova
Scotia fishing community of East Point Island. Hartley, then in his late 50s,
found there both an innocent, unrestrained love and the sense of home he had
been seeking since his unhappy childhood in Maine. The impact of this rich
experience lasted until his death in 1943, widening the scope of his mature
work, which included numerous portrayals of the Masons, of whom he wrote: "Five
magnificent chapters out of an amazing, human book, these beautiful human
beings, loving, tender, strong, courageous, dutiful, kind, so like the salt of
the sea, the grit of the earth, the sheer face of the cliff." In Cleophas and
His Own, written in Nova Scotia in the fall of 1936 and re-printed in Marsden
Hartley and Nova Scotia, Hartley expresses his immense grief at the tragic
drowning of the Mason sons. The independent filmmaker Michael Maglaras has
created a feature film Cleophas and His Own, released in 2005, which uses a
personal testament by Hartley as its screenplay.
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