Maine Artist writes of his epiphany in Paris

“Somehow A Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley,” edited by Susan Elizabeth Ryan, 1997, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Mass., 246 pages, $25.

Several years ago at a major art show of German Expressionism, I had an epiphany. I had not studied the Expressionists but I knew who they were and knew the Nazis had devastated them by labeling their dramatic and emotion-laden works as “degenerate.” Countless numbers of those paintings were destroyed under Hitler’s regime.

Being part German myself, I had carried a silent shame about the greater crimes of that time period, but also about these crimes against art. Yet, when I rode the escalator down to a basement gallery in Washington, my German ancestry surrounded me in a new way. I stared at the jagged distortions and frenetic intensity of the pieces, which burst forth in a way I understood through to my bones. That day, my sense of art and of my own personal history changed forever.

Marsden Hartley, the Lewiston-born artist, writes of a similar experience in his autobiography, “Somehow A Past: The Autobiography of Marsden Hartley,” a posthumously published collection of his writings.

In the spring of 1912, Hartley, who was 35 at the time, arrived in Paris and moved into a studio to paint. He met Gertrude Stein, the avant-garde writer, and fell into the fervent art world of the famous home Stein shared with her partner, Alice B. Toklas, at 27 rue de Fleurus.

For Hartley, who already had exhibited at Alfred Stieglitz’s now historic New York gallery, 291, the time in Paris developed an important aspect of his artistic, thinking self. By the time he left the Parisian salon scene, he was a changed man.

He wrote: “And so I had been initiated in the new arts of Paris — and I was I felt certain more intelligent than I had ever been — for none of these arts were foreign to me at the first moment. They were all so alive and pulsing I accepted all of them from the first.”

The quotation nicely represents the various aspects of this unusual autobiography about a Yankee who traveled among some of the last great innovators of art in this century. Hartley’s prose is often wide-eyed, self-effacing, and poetic. But it also can be clumsy and overly descriptive because Hartley is more of a painter than a writer.

Editor Susan Elizabeth Ryan goes to the opposite extreme in an erudite introduction that is informative but academically heady. Luckily, the book includes not only the long passage that Hartley intended as an autobiography, but also one of his poems, selections of his correspondences, excerpts from other autobiographical writings, a helpful time line of his life, and a decent collection of black-and-white photos. (Hartley’s luscious descriptions will make you wish for a few color plates of artwork, however.)

Those who are familiar with the formative tragedies of Hartley’s life — the loss of his mother when he was 8 and the loss of his beloved Lt. von Freyburg (the subject of his German Officer portraits) in World War I — can’t help but wish Hartley had revealed more about his personal life.

The autobiography portrays Hartley, who lived from 1877 to 1943, as a fairly easygoing chap. Others have described him as brooding and moody.

But Hartley was deeply devoted to art, and portraiture in particular. He traveled the world in the name of his art, and his accounts of those travels are a remarkable historical record of a rambling lifestyle that many artists of his time chose. He was an Emersonian at heart, and his writing reveals that profound philosophical influence.

It seems that it would be difficult to live so thoroughly these days, and Hartley, who lived his last years in Corea and died in Ellsworth, makes you want to jump into the pages of this book, go back in time, and experience that era of brilliant color and unleashed forms in the visual arts.