MARSDEN HARTLEY (1877-1943)
Lone Pine Peak (1,219 m - 4,000 ft)
United States of America (Virginia)
In Mountain Lake-Autumn, oil on canvas, 1910, The Phillips collection
The mountain
Lone Pine Peak (1,219 m - 4,000 ft) is the highest point in the Mountain Lake Wilderness in the George Washington and Jefferson National Forests, Virginia. The wilderness area is located next to privately owned Mountain Lake, and consists of 8,314 acres (3,365 ha) in Virginia and 2,721 acres (1,101 ha) in West Virginia. Thanks to frequent rains and a high elevation, the wilderness provides habitat not found in other areas of the southern Appalachians, habitats such as mountain bogs, vernal ponds and red spruce wetlands.
The area is part of the Mountain Lake Wilderness Cluster.
The painter
Marsden Hartley was an American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist. Hartley began his art training at the Cleveland Institute of Art after his family moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1892. He won a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art.
In 1898, at age 22, he moved to New York City to study painting at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase, and then attended the National Academy of Design. Hartley was a great admirer of Albert Pinkham Ryder and visited his studio in Greenwich Village as often as possible. His friendship with Ryder, in addition to the writings of Walt Whitman and American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, inspired Hartley to view art as a spiritual quest.
Hartley first traveled to Europe in April 1912, and he became acquainted with Gertrude Stein's circle of Avant-garde writers and artists in Paris. Stein, along with Hart Crane and Sherwood Anderson, encouraged Hartley to write as well as paint.
In 1913, Hartley moved to Berlin, where he continued to paint and befriended the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. He also collected Bavarian folk art. His work during this period was a combination of abstraction and German Expressionism, fueled by his personal brand of mysticism.
In Berlin, Hartley developed a close relationship with a Prussian lieutenant, Karl von Freyburg. References to Freyburg were a recurring motif in Hartley's work, most notably in Portrait of a German Officer (1914). Freyburg's subsequent death during the war hit Hartley hard, and he afterward idealized their relationship. Many scholars believe Hartley to have been gay, and have interpreted his work regarding Freyburg as embodying his homosexual feelings for him.
Hartley finally returned to the U.S. in early 1916. He lived in Europe again from 1921 to 1930, when he moved back to the U.S. for good. He painted throughout the country, in Massachusetts, New Mexico, California, and New York. He returned to Maine in 1937, after declaring that he wanted to become "the painter of Maine" and depict American life at a local level. This aligned Hartley with the Regionalism movement, a group of artists active from the early- to-mid 20th century that attempted to represent a distinctly "American art." He continued to paint in Maine, primarily scenes around Lovell and the Corea coast, until his death in Ellsworth in 1943. His ashes were scattered on the Androscoggin River. Most of his mountains paintings of Maine are nowadays in the MET collections.
2018 - Wandering Vertexes...
Un blog de Francis Rousseau
