Maine Man

A deaf, weary, unkempt man of 66 died of myocarditis at the little coastal hospital in Ellsworth, Me. in September 1943, and only other painters made much note of the news that Marsden Hartley was gone. But when 111 of his 700-odd works were seen in Manhattan at the Museum of Modern Art's current Hartley exhibition, many critics began to feel that they added up to a major U.S. artistic achievement.

In early life Marsden Hartley had stumbled from school to school and manner to manner, echoing such modern European masters as Cezanne, Seurat, Rousseau, Rouault and the violent German

Expressionists. But as he aged he produced tough, vivid pictures in a manner entirely his own. His subjects were Maine mountains, fish, flowers, ropes, shells, and harsh, haunting portraits, painted from memory, of men who were his spiritual heroes. Among the Museum's most striking Hartleys :

Mt. Katahdin, Autumn, No. 1 (see cut). Hartley was obsessed by mountains, declared: "There aren't more than two people in the country who understand mountains. I know as much as any American about [them]."

Portrait of Albert Pinkham Ryder (see cut), a recollection of the 19th-Century U.S. master whom Hartley knew and revered. Of a Ryder painting he once said: ". . . the power that was in it shook the rafters of my being."

Fishermen's Last Supper, Second Version, painted after the drowning of two young Nova Scotia fishermen with whose family Hartley lived one summer. At table, five of the family face three empty chairs. Two chairs are decorated with flowers; the third was Hartley's--"I couldn't paint myself."

The Lighthouse, a jagged, violent, almost blinding evocation of the Maine seacoast in high sunlight.

Bachelor of Arts. Marsden was born Edmund Hartley, of English parents who had settled in Lewiston, Me. He studied at the Cleveland Art School, Manhattan's Chase School and National School of Design, contributed to Manhattan's historic 1913 Armory Show, where modern art first drew a big U.S. public, thanks to Marcel Duchamps' cubistic Nude Descending a Staircase. Hartley was also among the handful of modernists sponsored by famed Manhattan Photographer Alfred Stieglitz.*

When Yankee Hartley went to Paris in 1912, he was desolated to find it "just a city, dirty as any other city." Back in the U.S., he usually spent his summers in Maine, winters in small Manhattan rooms. An unshakable bachelor, he loved to cook, never drank, is said to have worn the same black Homburg hat from 1912 to 1938. Almost every year there was a small Hartley exhibition, and a few pictures were sold. His steady industry also resulted in three volumes of sincere verse (Twenty-Five Poems; Androscoggin; Sea Burial), and a book of essays (Adventures in the Arts). His hobbies were concocting perfumes, collecting Coptic textiles and antique bric-a-brac.

For some weeks before his death. Hartley began to withdraw from his friends on the Maine coast. They soon discovered that he fell asleep while sitting in a chair. They brought the village doctor, who persuaded him to go to the hospital. There he died, alone.

*Manhattan dealers who later handled Hartley's work: Hudson D. Walker Galleries, Paul Rosenberg & Co. Hartley paintings now sell as high as $2,500.

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