An American Back from Paris. (Books).(Marsden Hartley: Man of the World, Painter from Maine)(Book Review)

Marsden Hartley: Man of the World, Painter from Maine

Wadsworth Athenaeum, Hartford, CT

Marsden Hartley Catalogue of the Exhibition

Edited by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser Yale Univ. Press. 334 pages, $55.

The following is based upon the author's entry i,i GLBTQ.com, an on-line encyclopedia.

A CENTRAL FIGURE in the evolution of modern American art, Marsden Hartley was also among a handful of gay and lesbian artists who came to define the delicate balance between the poetic and the erotic in the early days of the American avant-garde. Hartley's considerable gifts as an artist (he was also a noted essayist) are on display in the first Marsden Hartley retrospective in over twenty years. Organized by the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, the exhibit is comprised of 85 paintings and twenty works on paper, which together represent each important stage of the artist's creative life.

Born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1877, his given name was Edmund Hartley. His mother died when he was only eight years old, an event that may have haunted him through his entire life. Certainly death was to be the subject of many of his most memorable paintings. In 1889, four years after the demise of his mother, Hartley's father married Martha Marsden, whose maiden name the painter would adopt as his first name in 1906. From 1898 to 1904, Hartley studied at the Cleveland School of Art, the New York School of Art, and the National Academy of Design. In 1909, he landed his first major exhibition, which showed at Alfred Stieglitz's highly respected New York gallery, Gallery 291. He exhibited there again in 1912, the same year in which, like so many artists of his generation, he made a pilgrimage to Paris. There he met the well-known art collectors Leo and Gertrude Stein.