March 15 through June 18, 2017
Colby College Museum. Waterville, Maine
July 8 through November 12, 2017
The exhibition Marsden Hartley's Maine, on view at The Met Breuer from March 15 through June 18, 2017, will showcase the American artist's lifelong artistic engagement with his home state of Maine. Approximately 90 paintings and drawings will illuminate his extraordinarily expressive range—from Post-Impressionist interpretations of seasonal change in inland Maine in the early 1900s to folk-inspired depictions, beginning in the late 1930s, of the state's hearty inhabitants, majestic coastline, and great geological icon, Mount Katahdin.
The exhibition is organized by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Colby College Museum of Art.
Born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1877, Hartley became known for his peripatetic nature, especially his time spent in Paris and Berlin, where he participated in the European avant-garde. Over the course of his career, however, he returned to his home state repeatedly, painted Maine subjects while living abroad, and proclaimed himself the "painter from Maine" in the final chapter of his life. With the artist's place of origin as its focus, the exhibition will trace the powerful threads of continuity that run through Hartley's work and underlie many of his greatest contributions to American modernism. To Hartley, Maine was a springboard to imagination and creative inspiration, a locus of memory and longing, a refuge, and a place for communion with earlier artists who painted there, especially Winslow Homer, the most famous American artist associated with the state. Hartley died in Ellsworth, Maine, in 1943.
Hartley began his career by painting and exhibiting views of the state's western hills in a vibrant painterly style, seen in works such as The Silence of High Noon-Midsummer (1907–1908), which he debuted in 1909 at his first solo exhibition at Alfred Stieglitz's art gallery, 291. Hartley worshipped Paul Cézanne above all other modern painters; in emulation of Cézanne's legendary serial views of Mont Sainte-Victoire in his home of Aix-en-Provence, Hartley adopted Maine's Mount Katahdin as one of his key subjects beginning in 1939.
One entire gallery of the exhibition will be devoted to Hartley's bold, audacious figure paintings, such as Madawaska-Acadian Light-Heavy (1940) and Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine (1940–41). The unrefined sensuality of the figures evokes Walt Whitman's poetry, which the painter also admired. His depictions of working-class men are typically static, even saint-like in appearance. The Met's presentation of the exhibition will include select works from the Museum's collection by other artists who shaped Hartley's vision, including Cézanne, Japanese printmakers Hiroshige and Hokusai, and American painters Winslow Homer and Albert Pinkham Ryder.
Marsden Hartley's Maine is co-curated by Randall Griffey, Curator in the Department of Modern and Contemporary Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Elizabeth Finch, Lunder Curator of American Art at the Colby College Museum of Art; and Donna M. Cassidy, Professor of American and New England Studies and Art History at the University of Southern Maine.
To accompany the exhibition, The Metropolitan Museum of Art will publish a fully illustrated catalogue featuring lead essays by the exhibition's co-curators with additional contributions by poet and theorist Richard Deming, Senior Lecturer in English and Director of Creative Writing, Yale University, who addresses Hartley's writings about Maine, and conservators Isabelle Duvernois and Rachel Mustalish, both of The Met, who provide new technical analyses of his art.
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Canuck Yankee Lumberjack at Old Orchard Beach, Maine
1940–41
Oil on Masonite-type hardboard
40 1/8 x 30 in. (101.9 x 76.2 cm)
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Church at Head Tide, Maine
1938
Oil on commercially prepared paperboard (academy board)
281/8 x 221/8 (71.4 x 56.2 cm)
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Bequest of Adelaide Moise
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
City Point, Vinalhaven
1937–38
Oil on commercially prepared paperboard (academy board)
181/4 x 243/8 in. (46.4 x 61.9 cm)
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Gift of the Alex Katz Foundation
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Desertion
1910
Oil on commercially prepared paperboard (academy board)
14 1⁄4 x 22 1/8 in. (36.2 x 56.2 cm)
Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Gift of the Alex Katz Foundation
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Knotting Rope
1939–40
Oil on board
28 x 22 in. (71.1 x 55.9 cm)
Private collection, New York
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Lobster Fishermen
1940–41
Oil on hardboard (masonite)
29 3/4 x 40 7/8 in. (75.6 x 103.8 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Lobster on Black Background
1940–41
Oil on hardboard (masonite)
22 x 28 in. (55.9 x 71.1 cm)
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Madawaska—Acadian Light-Heavy
1940
Oil on hardboard (masonite)
40 x 30 in. (101.6 x 76.2 cm)
The Art Institute of Chicago, Bequest of A. James Speyer
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Mt. Katahdin (Maine), Autumn #2
1939–40
Oil on canvas
30 1⁄4 x 40 1⁄4 in. (76.8 x 102.2 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edith and Milton Lowenthal Collection, Bequest of Edith Abrahamson Lowenthal, 1991
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Smelt Brook Falls
1937
Oil on commercially prepared paperboard (academy board)
28 x 22 7/8 in. (71.1 x 58.1 cm)
Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillan Trust
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Storm Down Pine Point Way, Old Orchard, Maine
1941–43
Oil on hardboard (masonite)
22 x 28 in. (55.9 x 71.1 cm)
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Summer, Sea, Window, Red Curtain
1942
Oil on masonite
40 1/8 x 30 1/2 in. (101.9 x 77.5 cm)
Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy,
Andover, Massachusetts, Museum Purchase
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
The Ice Hole, Maine
1908-9
Oil on canvas
34 x 34 in. (86.4 x 86.4 cm)
New Orleans Museum of Art, Museum Purchase through the Ella West Freeman Foundation Matching Fund
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
The Lighthouse
1940–41
Oil on masonite-type hardboard
30 x 40 1/8 in. (76.2 x 101.9 cm)
Collection of Pitt and Barbara Hyde
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
The Silence of High Noon—Midsummer
1907–08
Oil on canvas
30 1/2 x 30 1/2 in. (77.5 x 77.5 cm)
Collection of Jan T. and Marica Vilcek, Promised Gift to The Vilcek Foundation
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
The Wave
1940
Oil on masonite-type hardboard
30 1⁄4 x 40 7/8 in. (76.8 x 103.8 cm)
Worcester Art Museum
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Three Flowers in a Vase
1917
Oil and metal leaf on glass
13 1/8 x 7 5/8 in. (33.3 x 19.4 cm)
Private collection
Marsden Hartley (American, 1877-1943)
Untitled (Maine Landscape)
1910
Oil on board
12 1/8 x 12 in. (30.8 x 30.5 cm)
Collection of Jan T. and Marica Vilcek, Promised Gift to The Vilcek Foundation
