‘Marsden Hartley’s Maine,’ His Muse, First and Last

http://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/arts/design/marsden-hartleys-maine-his-muse-first-and-last.html

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However much it contributed to the Metropolitan Museum’s financial woes, the Met Breuer has delivered quality goods since it opened a year ago. “Marsden Hartley’s Maine” is the latest entry in a lineup of exhibitions that the outgoing Met director Thomas P. Campbell can point to with pride.

The show opens with an inspired stroke of scene-setting: a mural-size film projection of waves crashing against a bleak stretch of Maine’s Atlantic coastline. Despite the artist’s conflicted feelings about that northernmost New England state, it was his self-proclaimed spiritual home. And he was, indeed, a native Maine-iac (to use his own term), though with origins inland, not on the sea.

He was born Edmund Hartley in 1877 in Lewiston, where his father, an English immigrant, worked in a textile mill. We don’t know a lot about Hartley’s childhood, but he said its shaping event was loss. It came at age 8, when his mother died. He was inconsolable, and he stayed that way.

At her death, the family of nine children broke up. He went to live with an older sister elsewhere in Maine; other siblings were packed off to Cleveland. His father remarried, and Hartley must have been fond of his stepmother. (As an adult he adopted her maiden name, Marsden, as his own.) But a core of defensive loneliness had formed — that he was gay was a contributing factor — and so had a restlessness that kept driving him away from Maine and pulling him back again.

The earliest picture in the show, “Shady Brook,” a landscape in a wispy Romantic style, may depict a scene he recalled from childhood. But by the time he painted it in 1907, his geographic comings and goings were well underway. At 15, he had left Maine for Cleveland, where he took his first art lessons. Teachers saw his talent and steered him to New York City for further training. He went, but once there would dash back and forth to Maine. In 1906, he returned to Lewiston as if he meant to stay.

There he soaked in Emerson, Thoreau and Whitman — lasting heroes — and read natural history in the public library. (In 1908, he donated “Shady Brook” to the library; its Met Breuer appearance is its first trip away.) Day to day, his life was solitary, yet for a loner he maintained a surprising range of friendships. Through one friend, the poet Shaemas O’Sheel, he met, during a 1909 New York stay, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who offered him a show at his 291 Fifth Avenue gallery.

A painting from that show, “The Silence of High Noon – Midsummer” is at the Met Breuer. An image of the western mountains of Maine done in finicky stitchlike strokes, it’s exuberant but otherwise unexceptional: Impressionism past its date. But a second New York meeting that year, this one with Albert Pinkham Ryder, an artist as solitary but well-networked as Hartley, would move his art along.

Exposure to Ryder’s penumbral, spellbound paintings led to Hartley’s first stylistically unified and distinctive body of work, the “Dark Landscapes” of 1909-10, with their images of wall-like black mountains crushing tiny houses. Installed in a gallery with Hartley’s great 1938 portrait of Ryder as a ski-capped yogi with shy child’s eyes, these pictures sound a depressive bass note, almost operatic in intensity, that will run beneath much of Hartley’s later art.

The next life changer was Cézanne, whose work Hartley saw firsthand when Stieglitz gave that French artist his first, posthumous one-man American show. That was in 1911. A year later, hungry for more European modernism, Hartley headed to Paris, then on to Berlin. Berlin was a high. Its Aryan culture appealed to him. So did the buzz of militarism in the lead-up to World War I. And, he fell in love with a young army officer. Under the influence of all of this, he came up with a new painting style: a sumptuously colored, richly patterned, symbolically coded abstraction.

It was an important development. It answered Hartley’s growing ambition to be perceived as an urbane vanguard artist in an international mode. But the timing was bad. The war forced him to return to an isolationist United States, where internationalism was in disrepute, and continued to be through much of the 1920s and into the ’30s. Regionalist art was hot. Success lay in joining the American Scene.

Hartley’s reputation, never sky high, took a serious dip. By this time, he was no longer young; he had no money, or family to turn to for emotional support. His health was poor, worn down by decades of moving around — to Europe, New Mexico, New York, Nova Scotia — and improvising a life. His only viable option was to rebrand himself, cast himself in a role he had always both embraced and resisted, that of “painter from Maine.” From 1937 on, he began to spend most of his time on his native turf.

We return to our childhood home at our peril. The familiarity may be comforting; the contact with ghosts, consoling. But the inevitable, entropic pull back into old patterns of thinking and feeling we spend a lifetime trying to undo can touch off anxiety and despair. Many of Hartley’s late Maine paintings ride these mood swings. Their subjects may be “scenic,” but their atmosphere is fraught.

The tumbling woodland cascade in “Smelt Brook Falls” looks like a knot of twisted bedsheets. The floating cut tree trunks in “Logjam (Backwaters Up Millinocket Way No. 3)” could be a funeral pyre. The steeple in “Church at Corea” tilts as if about to fall. Waves breaking on rocks in “Evening Storm, Schoodic, Maine” rise like monsters from the deep. This is a Maine of fevers, fears and decrepitude, a place where all that is solid is fated to go away.

It is also a place of erotic fantasy, and, amazingly, not without humor. In “Madawaska – Acadian Light-Heavy,” a near-nude 1940 portrait of a Maine prizefighter, Hartley’s brush caresses the muscled torso with a lover’s slow hand. And in “Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine” from the same year, he makes the figure of a hirsute young giant in pink bikini briefs at once a sendup of he-man culture, a sex symbol and a homage to Cézanne’s “The Bather.”

Cézanne, the Provençal isolate, remained a guiding light. On visits to France in the 1920s, Hartley had painted Cézanne’s favorite motif, Mont Sainte-Victoire. Now, in Maine, he found a Mont Sainte-Victoire of his own in the state’s highest peak, Mount Katahdin. The show ends with portraits of Katahdin done in different weather, light and moods, up to the year before Hartley’s death in 1943. He spoke of them as self-portraits. They look like memorials, or one memorial: finally, something that stayed.

Organized by Randall R. Griffey of the Met, Elizabeth Finch of Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Me., and Donna M. Cassidy, a professor at the University of Southern Maine in Gorham, the show has a conceptual flaw. By focusing on a single theme, it neatens up a career that was far more varied and searching than anyone had suspected before Barbara Haskell’s great 1980 Whitney Museum survey.

Yet “Marsden Hartley’s Maine” makes important points of its own. At a time of vaunted global culture, it suggests the creative potential of rootedness. And it demonstrates that, at the moment, the Met Breuer is home to some of the best modern and contemporary shows in town.