Marsden Hartley

1877-1943

BiographyPainter, printmaker. Born in Lewiston, Maine, Hartley followed his family to Cleveland, Ohio, where he won a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art. In 1899 he moved to New York, studying first under William Merritt Chase and F. Luis Mora and the next year at the National Academy of Design. With financial assistance from Alfred Stieglitz, Hartley went to Europe in 1912, spending much of his time in Germany, where he met Wassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc, and other members of the Blaue Reiter group.

On the advice of Charles L. Daniel, a gallery owner who had earlier sponsored Paul Burlin’s stay in New Mexico, Hartley visited Taos and Santa Fe in 1918 and 1919. He was attracted by the landscape, which he thought “magnificent” and “austere,” by the primitive simplicity of local santos, and by Indian dances, which he proclaimed the one truly indigenous art form in America.

In the early 1920s, while living in Berlin, Hartley recalled the New Mexican landscape in a series of paintings far more turbulent and brooding than any he had done on location. The next decade he divided his time between Europe and America, but his last years were spent mostly in his native Maine, painting the rugged coastline and “archaic portraits” of local fishermen.

https://americanart.si.edu/artist/marsden-hartley-2099

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