Hartley exhibit a revelatory collection Art show features Maine landscapes

HARTFORD, Conn. – Fifty years ago, an exhibition of more than 100 works by Marsden Hartley would have been seen as a bold and perhaps even risky thing for an art institution to do.

Today, the first retrospective of his works – on display at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art through April 20 – is being viewed as more of a wake-up call.

“Seeing all the works amassed is revelatory,” said Randall R. Griffey, the exhibit designer and a contributing author of the show catalog. “It reminds one of why we’ve devoted so much time investigating the work. This retrospective adds so much to our understanding of Hartley.”

The collection of paintings and drawings by the early American modernist covers the subjects and styles exhibited throughout Hartley’s four decades as an artist.

Hartley is well-known for his Maine landscapes, including his Mount Katahdin series, and his paintings of the coastline. But he is not a household word, curator Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser said, partly because of the visionary quality of his work.

“His allusions to foreign places went against the grain,” she said. “The word ‘visionary’ is used to describe just about everything he did.”

His series of war motif paintings that he began in 1914, for example, was out of step with the anti-German sentiment at the time. But today’s audiences are more accepting of an artist of such an eclectic nature.

“We’re much more ready now for Hartley’s penchant to experiment,” Griffey said.

“He was ceaselessly experimental, unusually peripatetic and deeply spiritual,” said Kornhauser, who describes Hartley as “one of the greatest and one of the least understood of the major American modernists.”

While he was influenced by other painters of his day, including Paul Cezanne, and emulated some of their styles, Hartley is well-known for his landscapes, abstractions and his portraits of American heroes such as Abraham Lincoln.

“The exhibition in part shows how Hartley navigated between abstraction and realism,” Kornhauser said. “There were breakthroughs throughout his career. All of his work was very original.”

In the context of American contemporaries, Hartley seemed unusual to critics, Kornhauser said. He moved around a lot and experimented with different styles throughout his career.

“Even though he is known as the painter from Maine, his roots are really in European modernism. And it’s not unusual for a European artist to move between different styles,” Kornhauser said.

Both Kornhauser and Griffey hope the Wadsworth Atheneum show exposes Hartley to a greater audience. “He’s been highly regarded,” Griffey said, “but his renown hasn’t gone beyond that circle.”

The exhibit travels to The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., from June 7 through Sept. 7, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., from Oct. 11 through Jan. 4, 2004.