Mainer’s painting sells for $6.3M

LEWISTON – A painting by Lewiston-born artist Marsden Hartley has sold for $6.3 million, setting an auction record at Christie’s in New York for an American modernist’s work.

Hartley’s oil on canvas titled “Lighthouse” was painted in Berlin in 1915 and was in a German museum for more than a half-century before it was sold to an anonymous phone bidder.

The $6.31 million exceeds the previous record, which was held by a Georgia O’Keeffe piece.

Artist-poet Hartley was born in 1877 and grew up in Lewiston and Auburn before his father remarried and moved to Cleveland. Hartley returned to Lewiston as a teenager and worked briefly in a shoe factory. He made return visits to Maine throughout his life, which ended in 1943.