Marsden Hartley 1878-1943

A pioneer of Modern Art, Marsden Hartley could very well be remembered as the greatest Modernist painter America produced in the twentieth century.  With Nature as his ever-present muse and guide, this Maine native relentlessly pursued new material and inspiration throughout his career, constantly re-inventing himself but never straying from the themes which moved his soul.  From Eastern mystical and spiritual teachings to the mountains of his home state, from the arid hills and billowing clouds of New Mexico to soldiers in World War I Berlin, and from the lonely and desolate landscape of Dogtown, Massachusetts to the beautifully imposing Bavarian Alps, Marsden Hartley applied unequaled passion to each subject he portrayed.  For Hartley, at the core was a desire to let intuition, as opposed to analytical thought, drive his artistic output.  Thus the Transcendendalist spirituality and the sensuality he found inherent in Nature, coupled with his own trust in his intuition and unconscious, resulted in his own visual reality on the canvas, presenting the world as he saw it in an almost supernatural vein.  “The inherent magic in the appearance of the world about me, engrossed and amazed me. No cloud or blossom or bird or human ever escaped me.”  His bold, animated and unusual shapes, untraditional use of perspective, and heightened, vivid palette reflect a highly emotional undercurrent that was the driving force behind his extraordinary paintings.  

Born Edmund Hartley, it was not until he officially declared himself an artist at the age of 29 that he dropped the Edmund and adopted his step mother’s middle name, Marsden, as his first name.  He suffered a traumatic childhood, as his mother died when he was only eight years old and for many years his father left him to be raised by his older sister.  Thus his loneliness and sense of isolation drove him to seek solace in art.  He began his artistic training at the Cleveland School of Art before moving to New York in 1899 where he enrolled in the New York School of Art, run by William Merritt Chase.  The impetus for the move east was reading “Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays which he read in search of religious and spiritual inspiration.  Emerson’s transcendentalism struck a chord with this struggling young artist who had begun to commune with nature as a boy in the pastures and woods around Lewiston [Maine].  Hartley’s predisposition for spiritual truth became a lifelong pursuit and influenced his painting and writing.”    In New York Hartley found himself in a burgeoning modern art community, studying alongside many who would also become successful painters such as Charles Sheeler, Georgia O’Keeffe and Morton Schamberg.  Hartley eventually transferred to the National Academy of Design before returning to Maine to create the first important body of work known as the “stitch” paintings for his technique of “overlapping and interweaving small, brightly colored strokes of paint.”   It was his introduction to Alfred Stieglitz back in New York in 1909 which placed Hartley in the most important circle of art in America at the time, and thus gave this budding artist the exposure and encouragement he needed.

In the spring of 1912, Marsden Hartley traveled to Paris at the urging of Alfred Stieglitz.  Initially he painted still lifes in a style influenced by modern French masters Matisse and Cezanne, but by November of that year, just prior to a brief trip to London, he had finished six important abstract paintings, some of which had musical themes.  Hartley variously referred to these new pictures as "Intuitive Abstractions, Cosmic Cubism, and Subliminal Cubism.  Using the flat, interlocking planes and rectilinear outlines of Analytic Cubism as his basic structure, Hartley applied thin washes of pale color to his canvases to give them an inspirational, transcendent effect. In addition to the influence of Picasso, Hartley credited the diaphanous quality of Cezanne’s watercolors with revealing to him a method for achieving ‘a pure spiritual rendering of forms in space.’”   In a letter he wrote to Stieglitz on December 20, 1912, printed in Barbara Haskell's Marsden Hartley (1980) p.28, Hartley commented on his new work: "I am rapidly gaining ground in this variety of expression and find it closest to my own temperament and ideals.  It is not like anything here - It is not like Picasso - it is not like Kandinsky, not like any 'Cubism' - It is what I call for want of a better name subliminal or cosmic cubism....I did these things before I went to London as a result of Spiritual illuminations and I am convinced that it s my true and real utterance - It combines a varied sense of form with my own sense of color.....I am convinced of the (Henri) Bergson argument in philosophy, That the intuition is the only vehicle for art expression and it is on this basis that I am proceeding."