Marsden Hartley: The Biography of an American Artist FROM THE PUBLISHER
Townsend Ludington's probing, insightful biography of Marsden Hartley is the first full-scale work on the life of one of the great American painters of our century. Two weeks after Hartley's death, in 1943, Paul Rosenberg wrote in the Nation that Hartley was an "almost gigantic secondary artist." Now, as time affords us greater perspective on that eruptive period in American art, the first half of the twentieth century, we can see that Hartley was in fact an artist of primary, not secondary, importance. His career encompassed an abundance of phases and fascinations, all of them reflecting his abiding interest in newness and his never-ending quest for his own truth and roots. As Ludington reveals here, Marsden Hartley was a man of many parts: introverted, homosexual, given to great highs and mordant lows, maligned, neglected, and sometimes praised. He was a fine technician, a restless innovator, an intellectual who could theorize brilliantly, yet whose best art often went counter to his theories. And he was an inveterate traveler: after growing up in Maine, he had an early love affair with Paris before going on to live for periods in New York, Berlin, New Mexico, Nova Scotia, Bermuda, Mexico, and finally New England once again. Along the way, he had close if sometimes volatile relationships with many influential figures in American arts and letters, among them Alfred Stieglitz, William Carlos Williams, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Gertrude Stein, and Charles Demuth. And certainly his art itself can be seen to chart a course through a remarkable time of new discoveries and revolutionary ideas. Starting out under the spell of postimpressionism, Hartley absorbed elements of Ryder's idiosyncratic style, European modernism, the Blue Rider school, cubism, and American folk art. But when his own visions emerged--as they did in 1914 with the now famous German-officer paintings--he became noted first for the strong mysticism of his work, with its symbols and numbers, and then l
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Drawing on Hartley's letters and other writings as well as on the correspondence and reminiscences of the artist's friends, Ludington ( Twentieth-Century Odyssey: The Life of John Don Passos ) traces the restless career of the painter from Maine (1877-1943). Hartley, who spent his life moving between Europe and the U.S., had troubled friendships with some of the most important artists and writers of his day--Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Fairfield Porter, Eugene O'Neill, Georgia O'Keeffe and others. His relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, who supported him financially and exhibited his work at his Manhattan gallery 291, runs like a leitmotif through the book and indicates Hartley's character--demanding, touchy, often ungrateful but also compelling. Lonely, insecure, ambivalent about his homosexuality, Hartley was drawn into curious attachments and questionable allegiances, even embracing Hitlerism; yet he was able to form a close bond with a working-class family with whom he lived in Nova Scotia. This frank and unsentimental account of a life of contradictions and paradoxes returns one to the artist's paintings with a fresh eye. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Mar.)
Library Journal
Hartley (1877-1943), avant-garde American painter and poet, has found a model biographer. This first major study of the artist is accessible and appreciative, yet even-handed in weighing the man's accomplishments and shortcomings. Among the incidents described is Hartley's traumatic childhood loss of his mother, the tension between his homosexuality and a harsh New England upbringing, his liberating trips to Europe, the bursts of creative energy alternating with periods of loneliness and despair, and his sometimes difficult relations with friends and colleagues such as Alfred Stieglitz and William Carlos Williams. This book should help renew an interest in Hartley's achievements. Recommended for large art collections. (Photos not seen.)-- Stephen Rees, Bucks Cty. Free Lib., Levittown, Pa.
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