Marsden Hartley

Hartley painted his most startlingly advanced abstractions during the first years of World War I while living in Berlin…

marsden hartley
Painter, poet, and pioneer American modernist, Marsden Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1887. Displaying an early talent in draftsmanship, at the age of fifteen Hartley won a scholarship to study at the Cleveland School of Art. In 1898 he moved to New York City and attended the art school of painter William Merritt Chase before studying at the National Academy of Design…

marsden hartley
Many works online

marsden hartley
Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) was a critical pioneer of early American modernism, in the words of his patron Gertrude Stein, “at last…an original American!“2 Although the emergence of postwar abstract expressionism and minimalism for a time obscured Hartley’s centrality in American art, his work had a profound effect on younger American artists such as Milton Avery, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, and Alex Katz.
Hartley’s art, in the words of art historian Gail R. Scott, represents a quest to make “an art that emerged directly out of felt experience.“3 Hartley felt a strong kinship with the American transcendentalists, specifically Ralph Waldo Emerson; he shared their belief that the divine exists in nature and animates all its forms. As an artist, Hartley’s attempt to capture the spirituality and unity underlying life and nature is evinced by his wide-ranging subject matter, his experimental approach to painting, and the striking vitality of his colors and forms…

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