Marsden Hartley
Marsden Hartley was an American painter, poet, and essayist known early in his career for his German abstract paintings and late in his career for Maine landscapes. Occupying a peripheral role within Alfred Stieglitz’s modern art circle, Hartley’s works contrasted those by artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove, and John Marin, that reflected specific, regional American landscapes. Instead, Hartley’s works demonstrated his admiration for international artists and his fondness for experimentation; both of which perpetuated constant travel, attracting criticism for his “rootlessness, restlessness, and personal sense of incompletion” by critics Waldo Frank and Paul Rosenfeld. Nevertheless, Hartley continued to draw inspiration from various regions in the US, France, Germany, Mexico, and Canada. The ‘mountain portrait’ Alpspitze, Mittenwald Road from Gschwandtnerbauer (1933-34) illustrates Hartley’s influences as the sum of his childhood trauma, spirituality, and modern, cosmopolitan style.
Acquired by the Wellin Museum in 1986, Alpspitze, Mittenwald Road from Gschwandtnerbauer was a Gift of James Taylor Dunn, Class of 1936. Dunn’s brother Montfort, director of the Saint Paul Gallery and School of Art in Saint Paul, Minnesota, purchased the work on behalf of Taylor, who was actively serving in the United States Army from 1942 until 1945. Montfort likely acquired the piece after seeing the traveling 1944 “Marden Hartley” exhibition, comprised of works held at MOMA, New York, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Alpspitze made six appearances in the Fred L. Emerson Gallery, at Hamilton College before it traveled to Huntinton, New York in 1993 for an exhibition at the Heckscher Museum. After inheriting the Emerson Gallery’s Collection upon its opening in 2012, the Wellin Museum has since featured the painting in two exhibitions: “Affinity Atlas” from 2012 to 2013; and “Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection” in 2017. This extensive exhibition history, centered around a small, liberal arts college, speaks to the educational value of the piece.
An examination of Hartley’s childhood reveals the early feelings of abandonment that informed his lifelong preference for depicting scenes of nature. Edmund Hartley was born on January 4th, 1877 to English immigrant parents Thomas and Eliza Jane Hartley. The death of his mother in 1885 greatly impacted Edmund as “[He knew] complete isolation from that moment forward.” However, it was this isolation that sustained his artistic disposition. He sought companionship from nature and often withdrew into the healing solitude of the natural world to flee the afflictions and uncertainties of life. This tendency to flee and console himself within nature would continue throughout his life, encouraging his inclination to portray landscapes. Four years later, his father married Martha Marsden and moved to Ohio, leaving Edmund in his sister’s care. Edmund finally moved in with his father and step-mother in 1893, eventually adopting her surname as his first name. The instability that delineated Hartley’s childhood reinforced a “sense of repeated abandonment [that] played out when he matured.” Art historian Jonathan Weinberg suggests that Hartley’s processing of abandonment resulted in peripatetic patterns, characterized by natural separation and intentional severving of relationships, though his own unease, in the hopes of discovering an environment that was more conducive to his artistic life. Likewise, Hartley’s retreat into nature throughout his career is not surprising. As early as 1908, Hartley prioritized mountains as a focal point of his work, painting scenes of the White Mountains near North Lovell, Maine. Between the fall of 1933 and the spring of 1934, he created a series of mountain “portraits” in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in the Bavarian Alps of Germany: the mountain Alpspitz was a favored subject. Hartley’s turbulent childhood in Maine invoked a desire to overcome his provincial beginnings through an artistic expression of the natural world.
Themes supporting Hartley’s seclusion into the environment continue in relation to his spirituality and the essence of his paintings. After moving to Ohio, he began weekly art classes with Cleveland painter John Semon in 1896. Then in 1898, the young artist received a scholarship for the Cleveland School of At (Cleveland Institute of Art), at which he acquired a copy of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays. Seeking religious and spiritual inspiration, Hartley happened upon transcendentalism, which recollected his boyhood commune with the environment in the pasture and woods around Lewiston. This discovery ignited his tendency to pursue spiritual truth. The search for the ethereal resumed in the summer of 1907, when Hartley worked at Green Acre, a spiritualist retreat in Eliot, Maine. Exposure to theosophical mysticism informed his travels in France, Germany, and Mexico. It was not until his year long stint in Mexico in 1932 that he could tap into this creative energy by incorporating mystical signs and symbols into his art. Aztec art and archaeology informed theosophical mysticism and spirituality:
I have accomplished something which I have wished to do for years, that is to read heavily upon abstruse philosophical matters, I have wanted to get back to a state of mind…when I did abstractions…of them fiery in color for I have returned to the ‘gaudy flam’ of earlier pictures.
From that moment forward mysticism, symbolism, and bold color demarcated his paintings. Hartley reached this level of intensity through his self-immersion in the mysticism of nature and his identification with his natural surroundings. However, the new pictures diverged from the Alpspitze painting and other early works, in that they were derived from his imagination rather than direct observation.
Alpspitze displays the influence of eclectic styles on Hartley’s technical abilities. Hartley divided the piece into three horizontal regions. At the top, a vibrant blue sky supports floaty, cumulus clouds. Masses of jagged rock delineate the mid-layer, gradually ascending from both sides of the piece to create a pyramid shape at the center. The rocks are streamlined, flattened through color and sliced into geometric shapes that decrease in size as the eye recedes into the piece. In the foreground, or the bottom third, sweeping washes of dark color mirrors a sine wave in slope. Inclusions of lighter patches of rock from the midground are scattered around the darkness. Broken brushstrokes characterized by stitch overlapping of paint strokes and the thick, impasto application of paint mimics a Post-Impressionist style. Hartley described Neo-Impressionist Giovanni Segantini as the “only artists who has ever put a mountain spirit on canvas,” employing a similar style to capture Alpspitze. The thick application of color and visible brushstrokes demonstrates Hartley’s careful intention in the placement of paint. Viewers eyes meld the colors on the canvas, creating depth or flatness that invites them further into the piece.
Hartley’s Neo-Impressionist influence promoted technical applications that instilled a sense of oneness with the landscape. Likewise, his exposure to works by Cézanne, through Stieglitz, as well as Hiroshige and Hokusai inspired new compositional possibilities for landscape. Geometric facets evoke Paul Cézanne’s depictions of Mont Sainte-Victoire in watercolors and oils. The pyramidal shapes demonstrate rhythm and movement. Additionally, Alpspitze is compositionally informed by Japanese prints by Utagawa Hiroshige and Katsushika Hokusai, that Hartley had been interested in while a student. These artists of the ukiyo-e period demonstrated a radical break with tradition displaying images of landscape, animal life, and plant life rather than portriatiture of courtesans. Alpspitze mimics the woodcuts’ cropped perspective and use of diagonals, allowing the viewer to meditate on the simplistic forms. Illustrating the relationship between artist and nature, Hartley evokes a sense of the esoteric. Ultimately, his profound connection to landscape scenes inspired an exploration of aesthetics from different cultures and informed his cosmopolitan depiction of Alpspitze.
Alpspitze illustrates Harltey’s cosmopolitan nature, reflecting an artist whose spiritual and sensual approach to depicting landscapes stemmed from an earnest love of the natural world. The painting demonstrates his response to abandonment and isolation, his spiritual journey, and his various influences; reflecting his preoccupation with mountains in landscapes and a desire to overcome his origins through artistic expression. Ultimately, Hartley’s thoughtful depiction inspires us to contemplate how our phenomenological experience impacts our personal relationship with the natural world.
Works CIted
Alcauskas, Katherine. Innovative Approaches, Honored Traditions: The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Five Years, Highlights from the Permanent Collection. Clinton, NY. Wellin Museum of Art, 2017. 174.
Hartley, Marsden. Somehow a Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley. ed. Susan Elizabeth Ryan.Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997. 199.
Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin. Marsden Hartley. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002.
Ludington, Townsend. Marsden Hartley: The Biography of an American Artist. Boston: Little, Brown 1992.; rev. Ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. 231.
McCoy, Garnett. “South of the border with Marsden Hartley: Letters to Edith Halpert, 1931-1933”. Archives of American Art Journal 37, nos. 1-2 (1997): 1.
McCausland, Elizabeth. Marsden Hartley. University of Minnesota Press, 1952. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.cttts6zz. 57.
Weinberg, Jonathan. Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, marsden Hartley, and the First Ameriacn Avant-Garde. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993. 121.
