Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2008 by Wendell Garrett

Of course an over self-conscious straining after a nationalistic form of expression may defeat itself. But this is merely because self-consciousness is almost always a drawback. The self-conscious striving after originality also tends to defeat itself. Yet the fact remains that the greatest work must bear the stamp of originality. In exactly the same way the greatest work must bear the stamp of nationalism. American work must smack of our own soil, mental and moral, no less than physical, or it will have little of permanent value.

Theodore Roosevelt, "Nationalism in Literature and Art," November 16, 1916,Proceedings of the Public Meetings of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1917

The five years that elapsed between the exhibition of the group of American artists known as the Eight, held in 1908, and the Armory Show of 1913, at the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory in New York, where Marsden Hartley exhibited, marked a dramatic change of direction for the future of American painting. Like a number of other American artists at the time, Hartley went to Europe. He arrived in Paris in 1912, moved to Germany in 1913, and returned briefly to New York in November of that year. In October of 1914 he was shattered to learn of the death of Karl von Freyburg, a young German officer with whom he had fallen in love in Paris. Hartley's memorial to Freyburg grew into a series of paintings set against a flag with the Iron Cross hanging below (see frontispiece). But Freyburg's face is absent. Hartley's friend the critic Charles Caffin later described the symbolic meaning of the colors used by the artist: "white stands for 'flower-like purity,' red for 'glow of human fellowship,' yellow for 'joy of life,' and blue for 'more distant sensations of regret and hope.'" In December 1915 Hartley returned to New York again and exhibited his German officer paintings at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery.

American art students had been flocking to Europe for instruction since just after the Civil War. As William Dean Howells wrote to Henry James: "The American who has known Europe much can never again see his country with the single eye of his ante-European days." James was joined in Europe by John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, and Mary Cassatt, the extraordinary young Philadelphian who overrode her parents' objections and went to Paris to study art.

Colonial America did not encourage development in the fine arts--there were no patrons, no public art museums or private collections of consequence, and no art schools. However, a surprising number of first-rate artists such as Benjamin West did teach themselves painting, drawing, and sculpture.

After the War of 1812, faith in the future of the United States burned with evangelical fervor at every level. Painters took up the challenge to the extent that the writer Anna Jameson, visiting from England in the 1830s, proclaimed, "the country seemed to swarm with painters." Artists of the period by and large shared a vision with the society around them and worked from an intuitive and natural relationship with their audience.

"Nothing in history had ever succeeded like America," as Henry Steele Commanger put it. "Nowhere else on the globe had nature been at once so rich and so generous; as nature and experience justified optimism."

To describe the United States required the artist to develop a new vocabulary. In Hartley's abstract portrait of Freyburg--and his contemporary Charles Demuth's similarly faceless portrait of Georgia O'Keeffe illustrated on page 125-these American artists did just that.

Painting Number 49, Berlin (also called Portrait of a German Officer and Berlin Abstraction) by Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), 1914-1915. Oil on canvas, 47 by 39 1/2 inches. Seattle Art Museum, partial and promised gift of the Barney A. Ebsworth Collection.