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Marsden Hartley was one of the first American artists to absorb the lessons of European modernism. Melding influences of Cubism, Fauvism, and German Expressionism, he forged a unique abstract style for depictions of landscape, still life, genre, and symbolic subjects. An important member of the Stieglitz group, a friend of Gertrude Stein, and of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Hartley was a central force in American early twentieth-century modern art.
Born in Lewiston, Maine, Hartley grew up in a working class home. When his father remarried, the family relocated to Cleveland, and at age sixteen, Hartley began to study on a scholarship at the Cleveland School of Art. However, after his first semester, a trustee of the school offered him a five-year stipend to study in New York and in the fall of 1899, he enrolled in the New York School of Art where his work was critiqued by Frank Vincent Dumond, Luis Mora, and William Merritt Chase. Pursuing his studies further at the National Academy of Design, Hartley progressed from academic realism to an evocative landscape style, influenced by the work of George Inness and John H. Twachtman. About 1900, he adopted the "stitch" style of the Post-Impressionist Italian artist, Giovanni Segantini.
Maine, where Hartley spent his summers, was his principal subject matter in the first decade of the twentieth century, and a one-man show of his Maine landscapes was held in 1909 at Alfred Stieglitz's Gallery, "291." Exhibitions of works by Matisse, Picasso, and Max Weber at 291 were extremely influential for Hartley's modernist development, and he began to paint in an abstract cubist style. However, Cézanne had an even more decisive impact on Hartley's work, and he began a series of Cézanne-inspired still lifes in 1911.
With financial backing from Stieglitz and Arthur B. Davies, Hartley took his first trip to Europe in 1912. During three years abroad, Hartley came into contact with many directions of European contemporary art. He became a regular member of Gertrude Stein's Salon in Paris, and associated with Mabel Dodge and the avant-garde artists and writers who gathered around her. During this trip, Wassily Kandinsky's work and book, The Spiritual in Art, had the greatest impact on Hartley, and in 1913, he met Kandinsky and Gabriele Münter in Berlin. Spending two years in Germany, Hartley was invited to exhibit with the Blaue Reiter Group which was comprised of German Expressionist painters including Franz Marc and Kandinsky. Hartley's Berlin works were marked by military imagery derived from direct observation of the growing military presence in the country. Painting in style stimulated by the collage techniques of Synthetic Cubism, Hartley expressed the pageantry and dynamism of Pre-War Germany.
Shortly after his return to America in 1916, Hartley abruptly turned away from symbolism and abstraction, choosing instead a more realist style. From 1916 to 1921, he traveled in a restless pattern, spending time in Provincetown, Massachusetts; Bermuda; Ogunuit, Maine; and New Mexico where he painted religious subjects in a simple primitive style, and representational landscapes painted in the bold intense colors of the Western terrain.
In 1921, Hartley returned to Europe and stayed for ten years. During this time, he renounced expressionism and began to paint vivid landscape recollections of New Mexico. These paintings show the influence of Albert Pinkham Ryder whom Hartley had long admired. He spend the last years of this European sojourn in Aix-en-Provence, the southern French city where Cézanne had lived and painted.
Returning to America in 1930, Hartley focused his attention almost exclusively on New England subjects. The work of the last twelve years of his life show the development of an expressionistic personal style. Painting still lifes, landscapes, and coastal scenes Hartley merged the influences that had concerned him throughout his career, creating works of powerful emotional content.
Hartley's works are in numerous private and public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Cleveland Art Museum; the Brooklyn Museum, the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas; the Los Angeles County Museum; and many others.
LNP
*The essay herein is the property of Spanierman Gallery and is copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery and may not be reproduced in whole or in part, without written permission from Spanierman Gallery nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given to Spanierman Gallery.
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