Marsden Hartley 1897-1943

Us

We are cool, and we are pretty, anyway to the point, By this web we want to lessen the amount of people who take art way to serious. Art is something that should invoke feelings and use elements and principles only as tools. Sometimes a piece of scrap metal is only that, and not a symbol of the human spirit bending in a tidal wave of the post modern society.

Marsden Hartley

Here is the way it seems to be, at least to me. We seem to, in life, dwell on those things that have mystery and deep meaning, that can not be seen with a simple look. Marsden Hartley was one of those people, his art work was simply that magical and mysterious.


This painting is the one I like the most out of all his paintings. I enjoy how he gives feeling and human qualitys to the clouds. I also like the movement of the clouds and how they seem to wrap around each other, the darks and lights give a nice contrast. Picking this painting apart and knowing he was into occult painting my guess is this painting was certainly effected by this. The occult beliefs say that nature, everything from rocks to houses have a living breathing self to themself. They are alive in a way deeper then we see. His giving life to the clouds is in my opinion his way of showing his belief of this point. Also in the occult belief system everything in nature is balanced, for everthing that is good there is an evil, of the same amount. As when there is something bad there is good. This painting with a balance that comes fron the amount of darks and lights used shows this rather wizely. I also like this painting because of the feeling it gives, through the use of lights and darks. The dark is shaping and changing the light white clouds. It is the symbol of the danger a storm can be.

His Life

Born Edmund Hartley in 1877 in Lewiston, Maine, the youngest of nine children, Hartley moved to Cleveland in 1890. Following his mother's death when he was eight years of age, the family virtually dissolved, leaving him feeling very much like an orphan. In 1908, he adopted his step-mother's name, Marsden, hoping to reconcile with her and his father. Hartley was largely self-taught with no formal art training. His first one-man show at Stieglitz's "291" gallery was significant. After extensive travel in Europe and in the U.S., he seemed to choose the Maine landscape as his home. Neither truly appreciated nor understood in his time, Hartley, is now considered one of the most accomplished American modernist painters, and along with O'Keeffe, Dove and Marin made up the Stieglitz Circle as closest associates of their patron. Hartley was a published poet; he also lectured and taught. He was moody and never financially secure. By 1919 he had become dissatisfied with abstract art and had resumed more representational work. He died in 1943. His life and his changing, yet consistant means of painting has made his art that much more meaningful and wonderful to consider, when you give ideas to what the painting means to you, and even guess what it meant to him. arsden Hartley was a leading participant in America s first avant-garde, which emerged in the early 20th century. He was a core member of the group that revolved around photographer-editor-art dealer Alfred Stieglitz in New York City, a group that also included painters Arthur Dove, John Marin, and Georgia O Keeffe, and photographer Paul Strand. A painter, poet, critic, and artistic rebel, Hartley lived from 1877 to 1943. Those years saw momentous, often staggering changes in all spheres of life and culture. It can be difficult to fathom the depth of change that transpired during this artists lifetime. In that period two world wars were fought, and American society shifted from a rural to an urban focus as millions of people left farms and small towns for factory jobs and other attractions of the city. Americans benefited from a gradual lessening of restrictive Victorian social conventions and watched as inventors and industry made exciting technological breakthroughs. When Hartley was born, horses were the main mode of transportation, but he rode the New York subway and, before his death, saw the advent of commercial air travel. Such changes profoundly affected him. The many shifts he made in his art reveal Hartley s persistent effort to stay abreast of change, to come to terms with the dynamics of his world, and to forge his own contribution to it.
During his time, to be new meant to be modern and to be modern meant taking part in the vibrant and vital changes afoot in the world. Hartley joined a generation of radicals who shook off the weight of convention and tradition. Although trained in the art academy, he chafed at formulas that valued tradition over innovation. He worked to develop an original artistic voice.

[Art] can come only out of the burning desire to be oneself, he asserted. Thus, his lifelong project was to discover what his fresh vision could be and what visual forms it might take.

Another essential ingredient of his complex art and life was his homosexuality, an element that has received greater recognition in recent years. An outsider to mainstream culture as a vanguard artists he also stood beyond social and sexual norms as a gay man. The pressure to conceal this important part of who he was meant he also needed to suppress it in his art or refer to it rarely, and only then through a highly guarded symbolism.

Hi We are CeCe, and Sammy.
We are setting up this web site, to honor Marsden Hartley's amazing artwork!.
Please come back soon and visit us.

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