The Return of an Errant Native

By A. T. Baker

Painter Marsden Hartley should never have left home

It is nearly 37 years since Marsden Hartley died at the age of 66, and he has long since become a fixture in every history of U.S. art. But owing to a series of internecine disputes, it was only this year that New York City's Whitney Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago succeeded in assembling and documenting a definitive retrospective of his career. The show, after its opening at the Whitney, is now in Chicago, will move on to Fort Worth and finally to the University Art Museum in Berkeley. The accompanying catalogue by Barbara Haskell--the Whitney curator who organized the exhibition--is in effect the first detailed biography of this complex, tortured man.

With more than 100 paintings, the show is a confirmation of Hartley's true achievement and abilities. In her text, Haskell argues that the major revelation is the all but forgotten series of semi-abstractions that Hartley painted in Germany between 1913 and 1915. She maintains that "these paintings were equal in achievement and sophistication to any work being done by the key figures of the European avant-garde." But to the less zealous eye, the show proves almost the reverse. Even Haskell concedes that well before he left for Europe, Hartley had developed a style that was distinctively his own, deeply rooted in his native Maine. After Berlin it took him nearly 20 years of floundering among styles and milieus (though his technical skill sustains even his most differentiated works) and a return to New England to recover that authority with the triumphant and unique landscapes of his last ten years. Hartley was an American original who should never have left home.

Few men lived a more disheveled life.

Witty, often trenchant, Hartley rarely lacked for friends and even patrons, though support was often meager. He was always in financial uncertainty, living in countless borrowed houses, or as somebody's guest. As late as 1934, when he was 57, he had to destroy more than 100 paintings and drawings to save money on storage space.

Born in the Maine fac tory town of Lewiston in 1877, he was the youngest of nine children of a poor English-born cotton spinner. His mother died when he was eight, and the family dispersed. His father remarried and moved to Cleveland, where Marsden eventually joined him. "I had a childhood vast with terror and surprise," he wrote later. Shy and insecure, he began to paint. He received a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art, where he so impressed one trustee that she offered him a five-year stipend to study in New York. He took classes at the National Academy of Design and spent the summers in Maine. Slowly he evolved a style of his own, ignoring conventional perspective, relying heavily on expressive brush strokes. The neoimpressionist result was what Haskell calls "a degree of gestural abstraction that would not be surpassed in America until abstract expressionism." Hartley called these works "little visions of the great intangible . . . Some will say he's gone mad--others will look and say he's looked in at the lattices of Heaven and come back with the madness of splendor on him."

In 1909 the august dealer-photographer Alfred Stieglitz gave Hartley his first one-man show at his famed 291 [Fifth Avenue] Gallery. To his delight. Hartley suddenly found himself immersed in the Stieglitz circle. But his most emotional experience was his discovery of Albert Pinkham Ryder. "I was a convert to the field of imagination into which I was born," he wrote. "I had been thrown back into the body and being of my own country."

Under the spell of Ryder, whom he sought out in his downtown studio. Hartley turned out the massively authoritative series known as the "Dark Landscapes."

Stieglitz arranged to send Hartley abroad in 1912. With such sponsorship, Hartley found himself welcomed into the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein and its animated talk of abstraction, of analytical cubism, of form vs, content. Soon Hartley was painting variants of Picasso, Braque, Delaunay, Cezanne and most of all of Kandinsky. He called his new style "subliminal or cosmic cubism."

But it was Berlin that captivated him.

He loved its sense of pageantry and or der, qualities he attributed to the pervasive military creed of "blood and iron."

Franz Marc and the Blue Rider group welcomed him; Kandinsky discoursed to him on the law of form. Hartley was also in love with a handsome young German officer, Karl von Freyburg. He evolved the style Haskell so admires, a kind of syn thetic cubism heavily studded with military symbols and panoply, most conspicuously the Iron Cross itself. Von Freyburg was killed in the early months of the first World War. The result was the Portrait of a German Officer, which even incorporates Von Freyburg's initials in its lower left corner.

Back in New York in 1916, Hartley was stunned when his German military paintings were received with hostility by a public that was increasingly anti-German. His confidence seemed shattered. He sat out the war in Provincetown and Bermuda. In 1921 he returned to Europe, wandering from Paris to Berlin to Florence to Rome.

Finally Stieglitz, who felt Hartley's pictures had become unsuccessful derivatives of European models, brusquely advised him to return to the U.S. In 1930 Hartley gave in and sailed home again.

Once there, he returned to New England.

He tried to rid his mind of the clutter of theory that had so preoccupied him.

He proclaimed that "Maine is a strong si lent country and so I being born there am able to express it in terms of itself with which I am familiar."

By going back to his native land he would "make what was broken whole," he avowed.

By the time Hart ley assayed Maine proper, he was 60 and his health had already begun to fail, chiefly from bronchitis and high blood pressure. But the Maine pictures are like nothing else in American art -- art-powerful, brooding, with a sense of nature that is at once sympathetic and respectful of its massive power. They capture Maine in images that T.S. Eliot would have recognized: "What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands." Hartley made the journey to Mount Katahdin, the state's highest mountain, and came back enthralled. "I feel as if I had seen God for the first time -- I find him so nonchalantly solemn." When he died in a small Maine village, he was still painting versions of this long-lost but nonchalant God whom he had at last rediscovered.

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