About the Artist

(Edmund) Marsden Hartley was an American painter who experimented with styles and ideas about modern art in the beginning of the 20th century. He was born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877. His parents were English immigrants. During his life he traveled widely through America and Europe. The places and the people he encountered in these travels affected his thinking about his art. Hartley's painting style changed and evolved throughout his life.

Early in his career, Hartley made landscape paintings. He wanted to capture the spiritual forces he felt in nature. (For more information about Marsden Hartley's landscape painting, read about him in the Environment theme.)

In 1912, Hartley traveled to Paris where his painting became increasingly abstract. He also began to make symbolic "portraits." Instead of showing the subject's face or body, Hartley depicted objects, shapes and colors that he associated with the person.

In Paris, Hartley became friendly with a group of German artists and traveled with them to Berlin in 1913. At this time, shortly before the outbreak of World War I, Berlin was as an industrial city with a busy nightlife and the center for the German imperial court and the German military. Hartley described military parades with mounted soldiers in dress uniforms with plumed helmets, banners, and flags. These pageant-like parades were exciting and magical. Hartley said Berlin was "without question the finest modern city in Europe." He stayed there until 1915.

Hartley made a series of paintings titled the "War Motif Series." Many people today think these were Hartley's best work. However, when he was forced to return to the United States in 1915-the year the U.S. entered World War I-Hartley found that American collectors and critics did not like the militaristic style of these works. For Americans at this time, Germany was an enemy and German themes unpopular. Hartley was not very interested in politics. He said in 1916, "I have expressed only what I have seen."

Hartley's life became very difficult. He wandered from Provincetown, Massachusetts, to New Mexico and the Southwest, New York, Paris and the south of France, Mexico, and Nova Scotia. He returned to more traditional styles of painting, making conventional landscapes, still lifes, and portraits. However, themes of nature and death continued to appear in his work until his death in Maine in 1943.

Vocabulary Terms

abstract--Art that looks as if it contains little or no recognizable or realistic forms from the physical world. Focus on formal elements such as colors, lines, or shapes. Artists often "abstract" objects by changing, simplifying, or exaggerating what they see.

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