Marsden Hartley's Maine

Cassidy, Donna M., Elizabeth Finch, Randall R. Griffey, with contributions by Richard Deming, Isabelle Duvernois, Andrew Gelfand, and Rachel Mustalish (2017)

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Read an interview with Randall Griffey on Now At The Met.

Publication Details

Description

Marsden Hartley had a lifelong personal and aesthetic engagement with Maine, where he was born in 1877 and where he died at age sixty-six. As an important member of the artistic circle promoted by Alfred Stieglitz, Hartley began his career by painting the mountains of western Maine. He subsequently led a peripatetic life, traveling throughout Europe and North America and only occasionally visiting his native state. By midlife, however, his itinerant existence had taken an emotional toll, and he confided to Stieglitz that he wanted “so earnestly a ‘place’ to be.” Finally returning to the state in his later years, he transformed his identity from urbane sophisticate to “the painter from Maine.” But while Maine has played a clear and defining role in Hartley’s art, not until now has this relationship been studied with the breadth and richness it warrants.

Marsden Hartley’s Maine is the first in-depth discussion of Hartley’s complex and shifting relationship to his native state. Illustrated with works from throughout the painter’s career, it provides a nuanced understanding of Hartley’s artistic range, from the exhilarating Post-Impressionist landscapes of his early years to the late, roughly rendered paintings of Maine and its people. The absorbing essays examine Hartley’s view of Maine as a place of light and darkness whose spirit imbued his art, which encompassed buoyant coastal views, mournful mountain vistas, and portraits of Mainers. An illustrated chronology provides an overview of Hartley’s life, juxtaposing major personal incidents with concurrent events in Maine’s history. For Hartley, who was strongly influenced by such artists as Paul Cézanne, Winslow Homer, and Albert Pinkham Ryder, Maine was an enduring source of inspiration, one powerfully intertwined with his past, his cultural milieu, and his desire to create a regional expression of American modernism.

Table of contents

Directors’ Foreword

Acknowledgments

Lenders to the Exhibition

Chronology
Andrew Gelfand

Introduction: Marsden Hartley’s Maine
Donna M. Cassidy, Elizabeth Finch, and Randall R. Griffey

Becoming “An American Individualist”: The Early Work of Marsden Hartley
Elizabeth Finch

The Local as Cosmopolitan: Marsden Hartley's Transnational Maine
Donna M. Cassidy

An Ambivalent Prodigal: Marsden Hartley as “The Painter from Maine”
Randall R. Griffey

Hartley and His Poetry
Richard Deming

“The Livingness of Appearances”: Materials and Techniques of Marsden Hartley in Maine
Isabelle Duvernois and Rachel Mustalish

Checklist of the Exhibition

Notes

Selected References

Index

Photograph Credits

About the authors

Donna M. Cassidy is Professor of Art and American & New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine.

Elizabeth Finch is Lunder Curator of American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art.

Randall R. Griffey is Associate Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Press reviews

World of Interiors

“(a) fine catalogue of Marsden Hartley’s Maine pictures.”

The Gay & Lesbian Review

“The show and its accompanying catalog are impressive achievements in that they manage to hint perceptively at Hartley’s massive range of styles and subjects, even while restricting themselves to selections from his years in Maine.”

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Exhibition

Marsden Hartley's Maine

March 15, 2017–June 18, 2017

This exhibition will explore Marsden Hartley's complex, sometimes contradictory, and visually arresting relationship with his native state—from the lush Post-Impressionist inland landscapes with which he launched his career, to the later roughly rendered paintings of Maine's rugged coastal terrain, its hardy inhabitants, and the magisterial Mount Katahdin.

Hartley's renowned abstract German series, New Mexico recollections, and Nova Scotia period have been celebrated in previous exhibitions, but Marsden Hartley's Maine will illuminate Maine as a critical factor in understanding the artist's high place in American art history. Maine served as an essential slate upon which he pursued new ideas and theories. It was a lifelong source of inspiration intertwined with his personal history, cultural milieu, and desire to create a regional expression of American modernism.

In keeping with The Met Breuer's mission to present modern art in the context of the history of art, this exhibition will include select works from The Met collection by other artists who shaped Hartley's vision, including French modernist Paul Cézanne, Japanese printmakers Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai, and American painters Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder.

Marsden Hartley's Maine is co-organized with the Colby College Museum of Art, where the exhibition will be featured from July 8 through November 12, 2017.

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