Marsden Hartley and folk art

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2003 by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser

Widely acknowledged as a great, if not the greatest, early American modernist, Marsden Hartley (Fig. 1) belonged to a circle of artists promoted by the photographer and dealer Alfred Stieglitz, that included Georgia O'Keeffe, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, and Paul Strand. (1) Hartley was also a widely published poet and essayist whose work appeared in Camera Work, Poetry, the Dial, Vanity Fair, and the New Republic. Unlike his colleagues, however, he was ceaselessly experimental, usually peripatetic, and deeply spiritual. Over the course of a career of nearly four decades, Hartley sought and achieved originality, compounding and expanding his knowledge as he moved to new subject matter and styles, navigating between abstraction and realism. Persistent themes, ranging from mysticism and spiritualism to desire and death, and subjects ranging from mountains to masked self-portraits, can be traced throughout his career. Here I will explore Hartley's fascination with folk art, and its influence on his p aintings.

Hartley was portrayed as the painter from Maine, yet he was in fact a cosmopolitan artist, returning again and again to New York City to re-engage with his dealers, clients, fellow artists, and writers. At the same time, in keeping with the Stieglitz circle's spiritual and sensual approach to nature, he renewed himself through his love of the natural world. Hartley expressed it this way: "The inherent magic in the appearance of the world about me, engrossed and amazed me. No cloud or blossom or bird or human ever escaped me." (2) Although his life began and ended in his native Maine, in between he lived in New York; Paris; Berlin; Provincetown, Massachusetts; Taos, New Mexico; various locales in France and Germany; Mexico; Gloucester, Massachusetts; and Blue Rocks, Nova Scotia. In each region, he found new inspiration for his paintings and writings.

Over his lifetime, Hartley produced a compendium of writings on his own and others' art that in the process revealed the variety of artistic influences that shaped his paintings. In the essay "American Primitives," he expressed his admiration for the work of folk artists. (3) Impressed by a visit to the Newark Museum in New Jersey in 1930 to see an exhibition of American folk paintings, sculpture, and decorative arts (many lent by his fellow American modernists Robert Laurent [1890-1970], Elie Nadelman [1882-1946], and William Zorach [1887-1966]), Hartley wrote,

primitive artists are seldom at a loss to invent a technique which will express what they wish to envisage. They enter the instinctive degrees of analysis at once, and note the kind of object it is, they note the character of the tree, the way the bark and the leaf inhabit it, they note the way the rock settles and sits, the way the earth undulates and by what various forms it is vegetated, and an expression comes to them by this very passion for descriptive invention. If they do not all rise to the finer heights of art as in the case of Henri Rousseau, the French modern primitive, they nevertheless show degrees of taste and perception which the more affected type of artist would do well to observe and emulate. (4)

Hartley took his own advice, drawing on the artistic inspiration he gained from a lifetime of study. At several points, the influence of folk art is evident in his work.

Born in Lewiston, Maine, to English immigrant parents, Hartley was the youngest of eight children. The hardships of his childhood spent in this inland mill town, hours from the coast, gave him a legitimate claim to a true Yankee heritage that was quite different from that of the artists he competed with later in his career--the painters of New England and Maine, including Winslow Homer (1836-1910), John Mann (1870-1953), and Carl Sprinchorn (1887-1971). It inspired a fierce desire to overcome his provincial roots through self-education and the pursuit of an intellectual life.

As a member of the Stieglitz circle, he collaborated with Stieglitz in first decades of the century to promote American modernism. Stieglitz offered Hartley his first solo exhibition in 1909 at his gallery 291 in New York City. Hartley's connection to Stieglitz was a fortuitous on that introduced him to European modernism. Exposure to the art of Henri Matisse (1869-1954), Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), and Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), among others, influenced Hartley's own work and soon spurred him to travel to Europe in 1912, where, through Stieglitz and others, he gained access to the leading salons, including that of Gertrude Stein (1874-1946).

His admiration for Picasso's work prompted him to visit the Musee du Trocadero (now the Musee del Homme) in Paris, where in July or August of 1912 he saw the collections of primitive art that influenced Picasso and others. He wrote to Stieglitz that his art took a

very sudden turn in a big direction owing to a recent visit to the Trocadero. One can no longer remain the same in the presence of these mighty children who get so close to the universal idea in their mud-baking. (5)