MARSDEN HARTLEY (1877–1943)
The Mont Clapier and Mercantour Range (3 ,045m - 9,990ft)
France- Italy Border
In Purple Mountains, Vence, oil on canvas, Phoenix Art Museum
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.
The mountain
The
Mont Clapier (3 ,045m - 9,990ft) is one of the main peaks in the
eastern part of the Mercantour-Argentera massif, on the border ridge
between France (Alpes-Maritimes) and Italy (Piedmont),
The summit
is easily accessible on foot from the Nice refuge, in the Gordolasque
valley. In winter, it is also one of the main ski touring routes in the
area. The Italian side of Le Clapier bears the southernmost glacier in
the Alps, Le Glacier du Clapier, 40 kilometers as the crow flies from
the sea. This glacier is normally visible from the Pas Est du Mont
Clapier.
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2022 - Wandering Vertexes...
by Francis Rousseau
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