{"data":{"id":"572","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":572,"topgoose_id":3064,"tms_id":572,"display_name":"Marsden Hartley","sort_name":"Hartley Marsden","display_date":"1877–1943","begin_date":"1877","end_date":"1943","biography":"\u003cp\u003eAmong the most important practitioners of American Modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century, Marsden Hartley combined an understanding of advanced European practices with a deeply spiritual sense of the American landscape to create a daring and wide-ranging body of work in both abstract and realist styles. Trained first at the Cleveland School of Art and then in New York under William Merritt Chase and at the National Academy of Design, Hartley caught the attention of the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz with landscapes he had painted in his native Maine. The work earned him a solo exhibition in 1909 at Stieglitz’s famed 291 gallery, which also promoted the early modernists \u003ca href=\"/artists/344\"\u003eCharles Demuth\u003c/a\u003e, \u003ca href=\"/artists/371\"\u003eArthur Dove\u003c/a\u003e, and \u003ca href=\"/artists/838\"\u003eJohn Marin\u003c/a\u003e.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHartley first visited Europe in 1912,\nwhere he traveled to Paris and then Berlin,\nencountering French Cubist work and\nmeeting German Blaue Reiter artists Wassily\nKandinsky and Franz Marc. Enthralled by\nBerlin’s thronging crowds and military\npageantry, and having also fallen in love with\nKarl von Freyburg, a handsome German\nRoyal Guard officer, Hartley returned to\nthe city in 1914 for an extended stay. Shortly\nafter World War I broke out, von Freyburg\nwas killed. Devastated by Freyburg’s\ndeath, Hartley created a series of abstract\nportraits of the officer that included overlapping images of German imperial\nflags, military emblems, and fragments of the\nRoyal Guards’ uniforms. The paintings—\nknown as the “War Motifs”—were shown in\nNew York in 1916, at the height of anti-\nGerman sentiment prior to the American\nentry into the war, and were greeted with\nlukewarm indifference. Today they are\nrevered as icons of American art, masterful\nfusions of Synthetic Cubist structure and\nGerman Expressionist color and brushwork.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHartley spent the next fifteen years traveling throughout America and Europe. During this time he discovered Dogtown, a stark Ice Age moraine outside Gloucester, Massachusetts, with a craggy, archaic landscape that he captured in paintings such as \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/2031\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Old Bars, Dogtown\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e. In Hartley’s\nwords, “A sense of eeriness pervades\nall the place . . . [which] is forsaken and\nmajestically lovely as if nature had at last\nfound one spot where she can live for\nherself alone. . . . [A] cross between Easter\nIsland and Stonehenge—essentially\ndruidic in its appearance—it gives the feeling\nthat an ancient race might turn up at any\nmoment and renew an ageless rite there.”\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn 1937 Hartley returned to his native Maine, where he used a vocabulary of simplified forms and deep, rich color to portray what he viewed as the state’s solemn grandeur and began to experiment with figuration in a series of iconic, frontal portraits. In \u003ca href=\"/collection/works/25917\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eMadawaska, Acadian\nLight-Heavy, Third Arrangement\u003c/em\u003e\u0026nbsp;\u003c/a\u003eHartley\ndepicts a French-Canadian boxer he knew\nwith a series of massive, sculptural\nshapes delineated by loose brushstrokes\nand rich areas of color. The final\ncomposition conveys a raw immediacy\nand the sensuous intensity of male desire.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500012910","wikidata_id":"Q553259","created_at":"2017-08-31T10:20:48.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-03-31T07:03:26.378-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/572/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/572/exhibitions"}}}}