A penetrating biography of American painter Marsden Hartley, by
Ludington (English and American Studies/Univ. of North Carolina;
The Life of John Dos Passos, 1980). Ludington offers a
psychological portrait of an intense, contradictory, scornful, but
gentle man who transcended his 19th-century roots in Lewiston,
Maine, to view Europe as his home and to make a distinctive
contribution to modernism. "His loneliness, his peripatetic nature,
his ideas, and the subjects of his paintings all stemmed in part
from his homosexuality," Ludington argues. Born in 1877 to an
English cotton-spinner, Hartley was eight when his mother died - a
lethal blow to "his fragile ego." He worked in a shoe factory at
age 16, then a marble quarry, moving to New York in 1899 to study
art. Through Alfred Stieglitz's 291 gallery, Hartley eventually
gained recognition and some success. Almost until his death in
1943, however, he was haunted by poverty and torn between rustic
country and charged city, and then between Europe and America.
Hartley fell under Germany's spell in 1913 as he found not only
avant-garde culture but homosexual experience: Some of his
strongest paintings are cubist arrangements of military symbols,
inspired in part by a German soldier's death. Later, his passion
for his new-found home let him rationalize Nazi oppression in
"murderously dangerous opinions." Ludington effectively quotes
Hartley's letters, as when the artist speaks of failing to find
"the same convincing beauty" of Kandinsky's theories in his own
work, or of "the child within me, namely the romanticist, albeit
not perhaps a romance of love as of madness for the mountain."
Though a recognized artist with works in the Museum of Modern Art,
a despairing Hartley in 1935 destroyed over 100 paintings and
drawings because he couldn't pay storage costs. In such details,
Ludington keeps up the pace of the story - looking at the artist's
"mercurial" inner life in far more depth than at his work. (Kirkus
Reviews)
"A penetrating biography. . . . Ludington offers a psychological
portrait of an intense, contradictory, scornful, but gentle man who
transcended his nineteenth-century roots in Lewiston, Maine, to
view Europe as his home and to make a distinctive contribution to
modernism." Kirkus Reviews"Drawing on Hartley's letters and other
writings as well as on the correspondence and reminiscences of the
artist's friends, Ludington traces the restless career of the
painter. . . . Hartley] had troubled friendships with some of the
most important artists and writers of his day Gertrude Stein,
William Carlos Williams, Fairfield Porter, Eugene O'Neill, Georgia
O'Keeffe, and others. His relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, who
supported him financially and exhibited his work, . . . runs like a
leitmotif through the book, and indicates Hartley's character
demanding, touchy, often ungrateful but also compelling. . . . This
frank and unsentimental account of a life of contradictions and
paradoxes returns one to the artist's paintings with a fresh eye."
Publishers Weekly"Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) had a virtually
unique role as a modernist painter. He was notable not only for his
powerful canvases but for his poetry and essays. Townsend
Ludington's astute portrait of the artist focuses upon his
cosmopolitan sensibility in a generation melding modern art with an
American tradition of mystical idealism. . . . Ludington views
Hartley as an essential American artist embarked on a spiritual
odyssey." Robert Taylor, Boston Globe"
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