Marsden Hartley

(American, 1877–1943)

Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter known for his use of volumetric forms, rich colors, and bold lines. Similar to his contemporaries Arthur Dove and Georgia O’Keeffe, Hartley’s depictions of landscapes, figures, and still lifes, exude an auratic reverence towards the natural world. “The essential of a real picture is that the things which occur in it occur to him in his peculiarly personal fashion,” he once mused. “The idea of modernity is but a new attachment of things universal—a fresh relationship to the courses of the sun and to the living swing of the earth—a new fire of affection for the living essence present everywhere.” Born Edmund Hartley on January 4, 1877 in Lewiston, ME, he suffered a bleak childhood, in which his mother died and he was left alone in Maine at the age of 14 to work in a factory. Joining his family in Cleveland in 1892, he studied at the Cleveland School of Art, before moving to New York in 1898. Here, he attended the classes of William Merritt Chase and visited the studio of the reclusive American painter Albert Pinkham Ryder. Hartley would later travel through Europe, falling in with Gertrude Stein’s circle of artists and writers in Paris, and befriending Wassily Kandisnky and Franz Marc in Berlin. While in Berlin, he produced what is today one his most admired works, Portrait of a German Officer (1914), which abstractly depicts the military mementos of his friend Karl von Freyburg. Returning to America for good in 1930, he reforged his relationship with the New England landscape of his childhood, serially depicting the boulder-strewn, late 17th-century settlement of Dogtown, with a rigorous focus reminiscent of Cézanne. Hartley died on September 2, 1943 in Ellsworth, ME. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., among others.