Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts Spring 2020

Marsden Hartley: Adventurer in the Arts presents an array of paintings and drawings from many places the artist lived and worked during his exceedingly itinerant life. This exhibition and catalogue draws upon the holdings of the Vilcek Foundation’s American Modernism Collection and the Bates College Museum of Art’s Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection. This selection of artworks and personal objects, and the insightful essays by Kinsel, Low, and Navratil further an understanding of this important aspect of Hartley’s life.

Like most people who are happiest when travelling, Hartley was by nature something of a loner, even a misfit. But his sense of himself as an outsider allowed him to observe, participate, and learn quite readily from the foreign artists and art-theorists among whom he moved. His many writings make clear that he was seeking out, absorbing and then utilizing an extraordinary amount of visual and cultural material on his travels. He was also, of course, inspired and helped onwards by a series of generous mentors — most notably Stieglitz, of course; but also the Modernist visionaries Gertrude Stein, Franz Marc, and Wassily Kandinsky. When ultimately he returned to the Maine of his childhood, he would do so with decades of artistic knowledge and cultural engagement. Small wonder, then, that travel was so essential to his achievements.

Introverted, homosexual, and socially clumsy, Hartley felt uneasy and out of place in small town life, and apart from that he never much wanted, at least as a young man, to settle down. Moreover he was poor: throughout his life, purchasing home simply would not be possible for him. And his needs as a painter were minimal: as he later explained in his memoirs, “I have never felt I needed a studio and most of my pictures have been done in any kind of room and often on two chairs — and I still work on two chairs — sitting on one — the other the easel.”[i] Having reconciled himself from an early age to owning very little, living on a budget, and devoting himself entirely to his art (which included poetry, memoirs, verse drama and critical prose along with his central activity, painting) he found that his first major move — to New York — was relatively easy. Every new place was home, simply because no place was home. All his adult life, Hartley would never occupy the same rooms for longer than ten months at a stretch: his wandering was lifelong.