Marsden Hartley

Hartley first visited Europe in 1912, where he traveled to Paris and then Berlin, encountering French Cubist work and meeting German Blaue Reiter artists Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Enthralled by Berlin’s thronging crowds and military pageantry, and having also fallen in love with Karl von Freyburg, a handsome German Royal Guard officer, Hartley returned to the city in 1914 for an extended stay. Shortly after World War I broke out, von Freyburg was killed. Devastated by Freyburg’s death, Hartley created a series of abstract portraits of the officer that included overlapping images of German imperial flags, military emblems, and fragments of the Royal Guards’ uniforms. The paintings— known as the “War Motifs”—were shown in New York in 1916, at the height of anti- German sentiment prior to the American entry into the war, and were greeted with lukewarm indifference. Today they are revered as icons of American art, masterful fusions of Synthetic Cubist structure and German Expressionist color and brushwork.

Hartley 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 The Old Bars, Dogtown. In Hartley’s words, “A sense of eeriness pervades all the place . . . [which] is forsaken and majestically lovely as if nature had at last found one spot where she can live for herself alone. . . . [A] cross between Easter Island and Stonehenge—essentially druidic in its appearance—it gives the feeling that an ancient race might turn up at any moment and renew an ageless rite there.”

In 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 Madawaska, Acadian Light-Heavy, Third Arrangement Hartley depicts a French-Canadian boxer he knew with a series of massive, sculptural shapes delineated by loose brushstrokes and rich areas of color. The final composition conveys a raw immediacy and the sensuous intensity of male desire.