Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley

Date: 1914–15

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1999.61

Text Entries: Marsden Hartley was one of the pioneers of modern Art in America and a lifelong wanderer. His intellectual background derived from such sources as the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the art theory of the Russian-German painter Wassily Kandinsky, and the ideas of contemporary French philosophy. His compositions and imagery were influenced by the most advanced vocabulary of Synthetic Cubism on the one hand, and by Bavarian folk art and Native American art on the other. No less incongruous was his selection of places: he chose to live in New York, Paris and Berlin, but at other times escaped to his native Maine, the burgeoning art community of New Mexico or the solitude of Nova Scotia. Hartley first visited Berlin in May 1913, and enchanted with the German capital and its military pageantry, he went back the next year and stayed until the end of 1915. In pre-World War I Berlin, he started a series of paintings inspired by two German officers whom he had befriended in Paris, developing a personal iconography of German military emblems and insignia. During the same period he enlarged his visual language, incorporating a bold interpretation of Native American color and design. The result was a group of approximately six paintings titled "Amerika." Painting No. 50 is one such work, combining recognizable objects-a teepee and bow and arrow-with abstract geometric forms. In this structured composition with reference to "the gentle race," Hartley might have found a sense of order within the turmoil of war-torn Germany.

Marsden Hartley

Date: 1933

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1995.36

Text Entries: McCausland, Elizabeth. "The Lithographs of Marsden Hartley." <i>Artist's Proof</i> 3 (Spring 1962): 30–32. <br><br> Marsden Hartley: <i>Lithographs and Related Works</i>. (exh. cat., University of Kansas Museum of Art). Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Museum of Art, 1972. No. 14. [Note: This is the first catalogue documenting Hartley's entire print oeuvre: 17 lithographs. For <i>Waxenstein</i>, it cites the impression in the collection of the Art Museum, Princeton University. M. Symmes Survey, 2003]<br><br> Eldredge, Charles C. "Marsden Hartley Lithographs." <i>American Art Journal</i> 5:1 (May 1973): 46–53.<br><br> <i>One Hundred Prints by 100 Artists of the Art Students League of New York</i>. (exh. cat., Associated American Artists). New York: Associated American Artists, 1975. No. 45, p. 24; ill. p. 78.<br><br> Kornhauser, Elizabeth Mankin, ed. <i>Marsden Hartley</i>. (exh. cat., Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art). Hartford, Connecticut: Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum of Art, 2003. Text pp. 309–10; ill. no. 55, 58.