Marsden Hartley was such a fascinating figure...such a strangely glamorous yet bleak--even tragic-- life. He knew all these luminaries of modern art and literature...Pendergast, Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, but his love life was absolutely tragic! (It probably mentioned this on the wall label...)
He had two great loves, a young German soldier who was killed in the first World War, and, when he was much older and living in Nova Scotia, he fell in love with a young man (his ideal of masculine beauty, apparently), who was swept out to sea in a storm! Now there's a novel for you!
All of which is to say, I love that Marsden Hartley painting.
I know what you mean about that painting, Christopher. It blew any other painting in that room out of the water. I walked straight to it as soon as I saw it--for all the obvious reasons. Now you've gotten me interested in Hartley's biography. "Swept out to sea in a storm..."
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Marsden Hartley was such a fascinating figure...such a strangely glamorous yet bleak--even tragic-- life. He knew all these luminaries of modern art and literature...Pendergast, Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, but his love life was absolutely tragic! (It probably mentioned this on the wall label...)
He had two great loves, a young German soldier who was killed in the first World War, and, when he was much older and living in Nova Scotia, he fell in love with a young man (his ideal of masculine beauty, apparently), who was swept out to sea in a storm! Now there's a novel for you!
All of which is to say, I love that Marsden Hartley painting.
I know what you mean about that painting, Christopher. It blew any other painting in that room out of the water. I walked straight to it as soon as I saw it--for all the obvious reasons. Now you've gotten me interested in Hartley's biography. "Swept out to sea in a storm..."
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