 

Marsden Haley

left to right: “Down East Young Blades", Marsden Hartley, “Madawaska - Acadlan Light Heavy"

Editor's note: Edmund (later
Marsden) Hartley was born on January
4, 1877 in Lewiston, Maine, and lived
with an older sister after their mother
died when he was eight. Hartley joined
his ﬁ1ther and stepmother Martha
(Marsden) Hartley, in Cleveland, Ohio
in I893, where he began formal art
training. He began studying on a five-
year scholarship at New York is
National Academy of Design at the age
of22. Hartleys Maine mountain scenes
caught the eye of Alfred Stieglitz (hus-
band of Georgia 0 Keeﬂe), who ran
the most inﬂuential gallery for van-
guard art in the US in the early twenti-
eth century. Hartley ’s first solo exhibi-
tion at Stieglitzls 291 gallery in 1909
led to his long association with the
Stieglitz circle of artists, writers, and
cultural critics. Hartley traveled exten-
sively before his death in 1943.

major exhibition of the works
Aof American artist Marsden

Hartley opens June 7 in
Washington, D.C., at The Phillips
Collection, I600 21st St. NW. The
exhibition leﬁ Hartford’s Wadsworth
Atheneum recently and will journey on
to Kansas City alter the D.C. show
closes September 7.

Who is Marsden Hartley and
why should anyone care? The question
is appropos for anyone who has poked
at the notion of gayness as a unifying
identity. Is there, any there there?

We can celebrate Marsden
Hartley as a gay artist, while in no way
subtracting from his wider signiﬁcance
to American art as a member of the
Stieglitz circle. a modernist above all,
and in his various phases cubist,
impressionist, abstract expressionist,
and interpreter of the New England
landscape in the post-Homeric
(Winslow) decades of the last century. .

The two achievements are
intertwined. Hartley consciously placed
himselfin the tradition of Walt
Whitman’s democratic camaraderie, the
Emersonian tradition ofNature as well-
spring of human values. His friendship
with the (also homosexual) poet Hart
Crane obviously reflects this common
intellectual foundation. Hartley paid his
tribute to Whitman early in his career,
painting the poet’s Camden. New
‘Jersey house in l905 (windows reflect-
ing a fiery sunset red in a dusky twi-
light).

Hartley ‘s first major transi-
tion in painting style and subject fol-
lowed the first of his trips to Europe.
beginning with Paris. where he became
friends with Gertrude Stein. and Berlin.

 

 

in DC:

asses Andrew Whittaker

asiease as ems aeetiss Bee

 

where he arrived in I913. Until then,
Hartley had been rendering the Maine
landscape impressionistically. Berlin,
on the other hand, must be expressed.
He celebrated the vibrancy and color of
the German city in its consumerist
urbanity and moral freedom — and its
martial air, incorporating military
insignia and bright colors into his paint-
ings.

What may be difficult for us
to appreciate is that the Gemian army
at this time was seen as gay (like our
own navy?) and thus a component of
Berlin’s position at the forefront of -
modern gay consciousness and devel-
opment. Moreover, Hartley’s problem-
atical celebration of the martial (a
mood prevailing in Paris as well as
Berlin in 1914; read for instance the
opening of Celine’s Journey to the End
of the Night in which the cafés are
drained of males joining parades of sol-
diers marching to the front) was at least
partially inspired by his atfection for a
particular German officer, killed in the
first year of the war.

Hartley traveled to New
Mexico, Bennuda, New Hampshire,
and Mexico. By the early l940s, I
Hartley was back in his native Maine
and also Nova Scotia (wintering in
Manhattan). Here, his affection for men
and translation of the landscape found a
joyful/sorrowful union. Several of his
subjects, young Nova Scotian daredev-
ils, drowned while sailing in a stonn.
They and other models are as elemental
as the sea that claimed them.

The lumberjack at Old
Orchard — as he squeezes into a near-
irrelevant swimsuit — is a giant, out-
sized and thoroughly masculine.
Although a wasp-waisted lobstennan
does show .up in Down East Young '
Blades — wearing a necklace and color-
coded cruising socks — Hartley seem-
ingly had little taste for the androgy-
nous. Flaming American (Swim
Champ), Madawaska — Acadian Light
Heavy, Young Hunter Hearing Call to
Arms. even the lobstermen holding a
Greco-like Christ, all have the torsos of
ectomorphs.

Another painting that situates
Hartley in the gay strain is his memori-
al to Hart Crane following the poet’s
suicidal leap into the ocean (the two
had just visited each other in Mexico
City). Crane also had giant hands. and
isjiistly famous for his observation ofa
"match tloating in a urinal“ and other
symbols of male encounters circa
l920s. Crane and Hartley were alike in
placing homoeroticism at the center of
their democratic experience (or vice

versa) — as did Whitman. This implies
an innate radicalism in homosexuality
(not just another bourgeois lifestyle — it
is a vector of the spirit — it is an
impulse toward the aesthetic or
bohemian life of search).

' Between Berlin and
Hartley’s final return to his native land,
Hartley’s development is well worth
attending to, taking as its subject
numerous landscapes from
Provincetown and Gloucester to
Mexico and Provence, in modes more
and less abstract and sometimes sym-

bolist. Hartley poses a challenge, in that X

he is a deliberate modernist, seeking to
translate, not strictly represent; he is
expressing something seen; something
sensed. The several phases and turns of
his career, which obstructed his critical
acceptance, afford multiple views of his
talent and themes. If we do see him as
“the gay artist,” we can also thank him
for situating the homoerotic in its
wealthiest strain, as a force of nature,
spirit and the arts.

. j I encountered a biography of
Marsden Hartley (Marsden Hartley:
The Biography of an American Artist
by Townsend Ludington, Cornell
University Press, 1992) at the Ogunquit
Roundtable Bookseller, 24 Shore Rd.,
Ogunquit. This small bookstore has a
number of distinctive titles in a small
space and is worth your while when" in
Ogunquit. So is the Ogunquit Museum
of American Art, a_shoit stroll from the
beach. I also heartily recommend the
Calamus Bookstore at 92B South Street
in Boston (two blocks from South
Station) where I purchased the cata-
logue of the current Marsden Hartley
exhibition. Calamus is ﬁlling the vacu-
um created by the departure of the Glad
Day bookstore and is that rare combi-
nation of a fine gay literary bookstore
and porn shop (perhaps the one subsi-
dizes the other). V

Andrew Whittaker lives in various
places in the Northeast Kingdom and is
editor of the periodical environmental
newspaper, The Northem Forest Forum.
He may be contacted at northernforest-
forum@gmavt. net.

To learn more:

Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in
the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden
Hartley, and the First American Avant-
Garde by Jonathan Weinberg (1995).

Seeking the Spiritual: The Paintings of
Marsden Hartley by Townsend
Ludington (1998).

    

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