Marsden Hartley

by Cassidy, Donna M.

• ISBN13: 9781584654469
• ISBN10: 1584654465
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-03-11
• Publisher: Univ of New Hampshire

Summary

At the vanguard of renewed interest in Maine's influential early modernist Marsden Hartley (1877-1943), author Donna M. Cassidy brilliantly appraises the contemporary social, political, and economic realities that shaped Hartley's landmark late art. During the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hartley strove to represent the distinctive subjects of his native region--the North Atlantic folk, the Maine coast, and Mount Katahdin--producing work that demands an interpretive approach beyond art history's customary biographical, stylistic, and thematic methodologies. Cassidy, sensitive to the psychological and gender analysis traditionally central to interpretations of Hartley, becomes the first scholar to reassess his late work in light of contemporary American perceptions of race, ethnicity, place, and history. This remarkable new book resonates not only as a seminal Hartley study and a complex art and cultural period history, but as a superb example of applied early twentieth-century American intellectual history informed by an impressive command of primary and secondary interdisciplinary literature. Numerous and rich illustrations, as well as transcriptions of several key essays by Hartley, some never before published, including "This Country of Maine" (1937-38), round out this insightful, nuanced, and revolutionary treatment. Donna M. Cassidy's Marsden Hartley will engage general readers as well as scholars and students.

Author Biography

DONNA M. CASSIDY is Professor of American & New England Studies and Art History at the University of Southern Maine, and the author of Painting the Musical City: Jazz and Cultural Identity in American Art, 1910-1940 (1997).

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction: Beyond Hartley the Modernist	1	(16)
I Painting and Marketing Region
1. The "Painter from Maine" and New England Regionalism	17	(45)
2. Consumerism, Tourism, and Regional Art	62	(37)
II Inventing the Past
3. Autobiography: Creating the Self, Region, and Nation	99	(20)
4. The Lincoln Portraits: Between Autobiography and Public History	119	(20)
5. Artifacts and the Historical Landscape	139	(30)
III Representing the Folk
6. The Folk and the Modernist Primitive	169	(44)
7. The Working-Class Male Body: Masculinity, Homosexuality, and Nation	213	(38)
8. The North Altantic Folk and Racial Discourse	251	(38)
Appendixes: Essays by Marsden Hartley
A "New England on the Trapeze"	289	(4)
B "The Six Greatest New England Painters"	293	(4)
C "On the Subject of Nativeness-a Tribute to Maine"	297	(4)
D "This Country of Maine"	301	(5)
E "George Fuller"	306	(5)
F "The Nordica Homestead"	311	(4)
G "Fanny [sic] Hardy Eckstorm-Penobscot Man"	315	(4)
Notes	319	(46)
Bibliography	365	(18)
Index	383