Marsden Hartley

by Ludington, Townsend

• ISBN13: 9780801485800
• ISBN10: 0801485800
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-10-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

A penetrating biography. . . . Ludington offers a psychological portrait of an intense, contradictory, scornful, but gentle man who transcended his nineteenth-century roots in Lewiston, Maine, to view Europe as his home and to make a distinctive contribution to modernism.-Kirkus Reviews "Drawing on Hartley's letters and other writings as well as on the correspondence and reminiscences of the artist's friends, Ludington traces the restless career of the painter. . . . [Hartley] had troubled friendships with some of the most important artists and writers of his day-Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Fairfield Porter, Eugene O'Neill, Georgia O'Keeffe, and others. His relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, who supported him financially and exhibited his work, . . . runs like a leitmotif through the book, and indicates Hartley's character-demanding, touchy, often ungrateful but also compelling. . . . This frank and unsentimental account of a life of contradictions and paradoxes returns one to the artist's paintings with a fresh eye."-Publishers Weekly "Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) had a virtually unique role as a modernist painter. He was notable not only for his powerful canvases but for his poetry and essays. Townsend Ludington's astute portrait of the artist focuses upon his cosmopolitan sensibility in a generation melding modern art with an American tradition of mystical idealism. . . . Ludington views Hartley as an essential American artist embarked on a spiritual odyssey."-Robert Taylor, Boston Globe

Table of Contents

Preface	xi	(4)
Preface to the Cornell Paperbacks Edition	xv
Prologue: A Partial Portrait	3	(12)
1 New England, 1877-1900	15	(14)
2 "The Need of Comrades"	29	(11)
3 A Lonely Apprenticeship, 1901-1909	40	(18)
4 291, 1909-1912	58	(15)
5 Paris, 1912	73	(18)
6 Wunderland, 1913	91	(22)
7 Engulfed by War, 1913-1915	113	(17)
8 "An American Discovering America," 1916-1919	130	(21)
9 "I Hunger to Be All Artist," 1920-1924	151	(19)
10 Cezanne Country, 1924-1928	170	(16)
11 Looking Homeward, 1928-1930	186	(11)
12 Return of the Native, 1930-1931	197	(16)
13 A Last Venture Out: Mexico and Germany, 1932-1934	213	(23)
14 Beyond Intellect, 1934-1939	236	(37)
15 "A High Position as a Painter," 1940-1943	273	(8)
Postscript to the Cornell Paperbacks Edition	281	(2)
Notes and Sources	283	(20)
Selected Bibliography	303	(6)
Acknowledgments	309	(2)
Index	311
Illustrations appear following pages 112 and 208