Marsden Hartley and folk art

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2003 by Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser

At the end of his life, Hartley summed up his importance in a letter to his niece: "I am not a 'book of the month' artist and do not paint pretty pictures; but when I am no longer here my name will register forever in the history of American art and so that's something too." (15) In September 1943 his heart gave out, and he died alone in a small hospital in Ells-worth, Maine.

A traveling exhibition entitled Marsden Hartley organized by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford will be seen there from January 17 to April 20. It will then go to the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. (June 7-September 7) and finally to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri (October 11-January 4, 2004). The curator of the exhibition and the editor of the accompanying catalogue is Elizabeth Mankin Korphauser. This is the first retrospective exhibition of Hartley's work in more than twenty years.

This article benefited from the research that appears in the catalogue to the exhibition noted above, published by the Yale University Press.

(1.) Robert Hughes has called Hartley "the greatest of early American modernists" in his American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America (Alfred A. Knopf. New York. 1997), p.365.

(2.) Marsden Hartley, Adventures in the Arts: Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville and Poets (1921; reprint Hacker Art Books, New York, 1972), p.6.

(3.) Marsden Hartley. "American Primitives (1930-1931)." in Marsden Hartley. On Art, ed. Gail R. Scott (Horizon Press. New York, 1982), pp. 186-192. Hartley and other modernists of the period favored the term primitive over folk to describe this kind of art.

(4.) Ibid., p. 188.

(5.) Marsden Hartley to Alfred Stieglitz. September 1, 1912 (Alfred Stieglitz collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven. connecticut), quoted in Town-send Ludington, Marsden Hartley (Little, Brown. Boston, 1992), p. 82.

(6.) Hartley to Rockwell Kent, September 29. 1912 (Rockwell Kent papers, Archives of American Art. Washington, D. C.), quoted ibid., p.83.

(7.) Hartley to Stieglitz, December. 1912 (Stieglitz collection), quoted ibid.

(8.) Gail Levin, "American Art." in "Primitivism" in Twentieth Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern, vol. 2, ed. William Rubin (Museum of Modem Art, New York, 1984), p.457, n. 23.

(9.) Hartley to Stieglitz, November 3, 1913 (Stieglitz collection).

(10.) Barbara Haskell, Marsden Hartley (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. 1980), p. 43; and Gail Levin, "Marsden Hartley's 'Amerika': Between Native American and German Folk Art," American Art Review, vol. 5, no. 2 (Winter 1993), p. 122.

(11.) Gail Levin and Marianne Lorenz, Theme and Improvisation: Kandinsky and the American Avant-Garde, 1912-1950 (Little. Brown, Boston, 1992), p.51.

(12.) Hartley to Stieglitz. May 24, 1918 (Marsden Hartley papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University).

(13.) Marsden Hartley, Somehow Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley. ed. Susan Elizabeth Ryan (MIT Press. Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997), p. 199.