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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Marsden Hartley was a great artist whose greatness is of a piece with the provincial clumsiness of American high culture in the early twentieth century. A strong Hartley retrospective that has opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum, in Hartford, where it will remain until April 20th, confirms the lasting grandeur of the Yankee modernist, who stands in the history of modern art like an increasingly unavoidable, bumpy detour. At different points in his career (he died in 1943, at the age of sixty-six), Hartley was inspired by French masters, primarily Cezanne, and by German Expressionists, notably the Blue Rider group, which included Wassily Kandinsky. He adored Germany and had extended stays in Berlin. He participated in the fast-track salons of his day: Gertrude Stein's in Paris, Alfred Stieglitz's in New York, Eugene O'Neill's in Provincetown, and Mabel Dodge Luhan's in New Mexico. A secretive homosexual, he was, in his later years, part of an elegant gay scene that formed around the photographer George Platt Lynes in New York. He fit in nowhere. Solitude owned him.
In retrospect, Hartley's best art--made in Berlin from 1913 to 1915, and especially in Maine, starting in the mid-nineteen-thirties--looms so far above the works of such celebrated contemporaries as Georgia O'Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Arthur Dove, and John Marin that it poses the question of how his achievement was even possible. Like Edward Hopper, a very different painter and Hartley's only...
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