View paintings by Marsden Hartley

Throughout Marsden Hartley's career as an artist, the "booboisie," as H.L. Mencken liked to call it, ruled American culture with a smothering hand. Provincial, smug, timorous, and prudish, the American booboisie stood firmly against everything Hartley, a spiritually-minded homosexual committed to the most radical trends of modernism, represented.

Still, Hartley was around at an interesting time for American art. While he was growing up poor, shy, and lonely in the mill town of Lewiston, Maine, the spreading Arts and Crafts Movement stimulated a new appreciation for the handiwork of America's past -- from spare Shaker cabinetry to the energy-filled geometric designs of Native Americans. And in every turn-of-the-century American city, there were at least a handful of people who believed American art had a future as well.

A small circle of the faithful such as the wealthy Clevelander who paid for his art training, the legendary photographer and gallery owner, Alfred Stieglitz, who gave him his first exhibition in 1909, Gertrude Stein and her group of expatriate Americans who looked after him in Paris, Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos, and dozens of ordinary folk who provided rooms, studio space, and handouts over the years, gave Hartley enough support to survive, though just barely. Intense, eagle-nosed, needy, and difficult, Hartley the man never had an easy time of it.

But when, in his thirties, Hartley finally began to bloom as an artist, the results astonished. A remarkable clutter of literary and visual influences, including Emerson and Whitman, German Expressionism and French synthetic Cubism, American folk art and Episcopalianism, numerology and military bric-a-brac, came together seamlessly in a prodigious progression of highly original works. Hartley's work is so dense with ideas, so out-of-the-mainstream, so aware, and so visually fascinating, that it looks freshly made 60 years after his death -- less dated, indeed, than much of the art that came after it.

View paintings by Marsden Hartley

Hartley's popular success, though mostly posthumous, has been enormous. The latest measure of his triumph is the full-dress retrospective, "Marsden Hartley," at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford through April 20, 2003. The show of about 100 works easily reaffirms his reputation as one of the greatest American artists of the 20th century.

Ambitious, serious, and comprehensive, the Wadsworth show is only the third attempt ever made to assess Hartley's entire career in a museum exhibition. It has nevertheless been criticized, notably by Roberta Smith in the "New York Times," for slighting some of the many parts of Hartley's career. Sections of the exhibition, strung out in a jumble of grand and smallish galleries, corridors, and landings on the museum's second floor, do seem cramped and inadequate. But, to be fair, the expansive nature of Hartley's work defies the very idea of a retrospective.

An endlessly restless soul, Hartley relocated himself and his art every other year or so. As a mature artist, he lived and worked in New York, Paris, Berlin, Provincetown, New Mexico, Mexico City, Gloucester, Massachusetts, the Bavarian Alps, Bermuda, and Nova Scotia before circling back to his native Maine. Each move inspired a whole new series of paintings. Hartley had more "periods" as an artist than Picasso had mistresses.

Still, as much as he wandered physically, Hartley rarely seemed to lose his footing. Wherever he landed, he was able to open up shop. Each phase had its characteristic colors, shapes, brushwork, rooted in a distinct artistic center that sprang, apparently immediately, from a fresh, and remarkably resolved, view of his surroundings.

The Wadsworth devotes a spacious gallery to Hartley's early Berlin paintings, probably his most famous work. Made just before World War I, these brightly colored, nearly abstract compositions combine two of Hartley's early fascinations: Cubist space and the martial atmosphere of the Imperial German capital. The compositions include motifs based on the German Iron Cross, military regalia, and flags, symbolic numbers, and, in "Portrait of a German Officer" (1914), the most famous Hartley of all, a coded memorial to his friend and beloved, Karl von Freyburg, killed near the German frontlines in Amiens, France.

Back in the U.S. in 1916, Hartley moved deep into abstraction with the austerely composed, pastel-colored "Provincetown Series," but swung back to an expressionist realism for the drawings of the New Mexico landscape he made from 1918-1920, converted to equally haunting oils in the early 1920s.

View paintings by Marsden Hartley

Hartley rambled widely in the next decade, from the South of France, where he paid homage in paint to C?nne's beloved Mont-Ste-Victoire, to Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he painted austere landscapes in the desolate "Dogtown" district, to the Bavarian Alps. Finally he returned, in 1934, to his native state, where he set out to become "the artist from Maine."

Hartley's late New England and Canadian works include rugged landscapes, including dramatic studies of Maine's sacred Mt. Katahdin (of which Hartley said "I feel as if I had seen God for the first time -- I find him so nonchalantly solemn") and powerful portraits of half nude, burly men and sturdy Nova Scotia fisher folk. The paintings exude an almost shamanistic primitivism, a worldly, hermetic take on rural folk styles.

Given the range and variety of Hartley's art, it is hard to believe it all hangs together. Yet every work in the Wadsworth show is distinctly and uniquely a Hartley. Two threads in particular seem to run through all the paintings. One theme is Hartley's deep spirituality: a kind of monastic mysticism full of suffering and wonder. The other, rather contrarily, is his ubiquitous eroticism.

Much commented on, in recent years, by scholars of gay aesthetics, as well as by reviewers of this exhibition, the sexuality of Hartley's art seems sometimes sublimated, sometimes overt. His work is, in any case, relentlessly concave -- full of thrusting trees, lighthouses, eels, calla lilies, towering mountains, and other phallic symbols that are not, of course, restricted to works by homosexual artists.

In the bulky male nudes of his late career, including the innocently voluptuous "Madawaska -- Acadian Light-Heavy" (1940), the homoerotic content seems obvious (Hartley claimed these works were painted "for a gymnasium.") Yet, they too, have comrades in the bare-chested heroes that appeared, in the 1930s, in American Regionalism, Soviet Realism, and prominently in the Aryan fantasies of the Nazi regime.

The erotic and the spiritual combine in a late, primitivistic work that was discovered, untitled, in Hartley's estate. Now called "Christ Held by Half-Naked Men" (1940-41), this mysterious painting seems emblematic of Hartley's entire career. The all-male piet?s centered on a burly, half-nude fisherman who takes the role of the Virgin Mary, holding a small and fragile Christ on his lap. Behind them are rows of Hartley's massive, shirtless men: silent, nonchalantly solemn acolytes of Hartley's religion of one.

The "Marsden Hartley" exhibit will be on view through April 20, 2003 at the Wadworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, CT.

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