Arts
Pride Around The World Calendar 2003
Marsden Hartley in D.C.
Marsden Hartley in D.C.
"Down East Young Blades" (left) and "Madawaska - Acadian Heavy Light"
by Andrew Whittaker
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 father and stepmother Martha (Marsden) Hartley, in Cleveland, Ohio in 1893, where he began formal art training. He began studying on a five-year scholarship at New York’s National Academy of Design at the age of 22. Hartley’s Maine mountain scenes caught the eye of Alfred Stieglitz (husband of Georgia O’Keeffe), who ran the most influential gallery for vanguard art in the US in the early twentieth century. Hartley’s first solo exhibition at Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in 1909 led to his long association with the Stieglitz circle of artists, writers, and cultural critics. Hartley traveled extensively before his death in 1943.
A major exhibition of the works of American artist Marsden Hartley opens June 7 in Washington, D.C., at The Phillips Collection, 1600 21st St. NW. The exhibition left Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum recently and will journey on to Kansas City after 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 himself in the tradition of Walt Whitman’s democratic camaraderie, the Emersonian tradition of Nature as wellspring 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 1905 (windows reflecting a fiery sunset red in a dusky twilight).
Hartley’s first major transition in painting style and subject followed the first of his trips to Europe, beginning with Paris, where he became friends with Gertrude Stein, and Berlin, where he arrived in 1913. 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 paintings.
What may be difficult for us to appreciate is that the German 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 development. Moreover, Hartley’s problematical 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 cafˇs are drained of males joining parades of soldiers marching to the front) was at least partially inspired by his affection for a particular German officer, killed in the first year of the war.
Hartley traveled to New Mexico, Bermuda, New Hampshire, and Mexico. By the early 1940s, 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 daredevils, drowned while sailing in a storm. 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 lobsterman does show up in Down East Young Blades – wearing a necklace and color-coded cruising socks – Hartley seemingly had little taste for the androgynous. 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 memorial 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 is justly famous for his observation of a “match floating in a urinal” and other symbols of male encounters circa 1920s. 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 symbolist. Hartley poses a challenge, in that 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.
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 short 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 catalogue of the current Marsden Hartley exhibition. Calamus is filling the vacuum created by the departure of the Glad Day bookstore and is that rare combination of a fine gay literary bookstore and porn shop (perhaps the one subsidizes the other).
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).
Andrew Whittaker lives in various places in the Northeast Kingdom and is editor of the periodical environmental newspaper, The Northern Forest Forum. He may be contacted at northernforestforum@gmavt.net.