"Spirit is awareness, intelligence, recollection. It requires no dogma ..." - George Santayana, excerpt from Platonism and the Spiritual Life.(1927)
It may not look so to us now but this painting was radical when it was painted by Marsden Hartley in 1916. It would be ten more years before other American artists would follow his example down the non-objective path. The boy who grew up in a small industrial city in southern Maine went on to become one of the most cosmopolitan of American artists.
Hartley spent the summer of 1916 in Provincetown and the winter in Bermuda where he painted with his friend and fellow artist Charles Demuth. In both places, proximity to the Atlantic inspired a series of paintings of sailboats in which Hartley worked out his response to cubism. The colors he used are uniformly muted, pale shades of blue, pink, yellow, and beige, accented by touches of white. In Movement, Bermuda the sails are precisely drawn; they unfurl in overlapping planes. Windswept, the sails are all angular blocks of color, balanced by the curve of the hull and an unexplained half bullseye on the sail. They are tethered to a mast that has been reduced to a thin line ending in a small black knob touching the top of the canvas. The rudder and tiller at bottom Combining rectangular and rounded elements, the rudder and tiller anchor the sailboat in an indeterminate, colorless setting.
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) grew up in Lewiston, Maine, the youngest of nine children born to English immigrant parents. After his mother died and his father remarried and moved to Ohio, the boy was left behind to work in a shoe factory. Reading took Hartley, whose given name was Edmond, out of his lonely world into the expansive world of the Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau, and the ecstatic Walt Whitman.
Hartley's first solo exhibition in 1909 took place at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery in New York. Despite Stieglitz's many art world connections, having him as dealer was not an unmixed blessing; he was manipulative and often unreliable. But at 291 Hartley got his first look at paintings by Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne.
Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) grew up in Lewiston, Maine, the youngest of nine children born to English immigrant parents. After his mother died and his father remarried and moved to Ohio, the boy was left behind to work in a shoe factory. Reading took Hartley, whose given name was Edmond, out of his lonely world into the expansive world of the Transcendentalists, Emerson and Thoreau, and the ecstatic Walt Whitman.
Hartley's first solo exhibition in 1909 took place at Alfred Stieglitz's 291 Gallery in New York. Despite Stieglitz's many art world connections, having him as dealer was not an unmixed blessing; he was manipulative and often unreliable. But at 291 Hartley got his first look at paintings by Matisse, Picasso, and Cezanne.
In middle age Marsden Hartley discovered the work of the Harvard philosopher George Santayana whose Platonism and the Spiritual Life.(1927) made a deep impression on the artist. Hartley was what we would now describe as a deeply closeted homosexual and a bred-in-the-bone New England puritan. Santayana, who published The Last Puritan (1935), a novel in the form of a memoir, was seemingly so far inside the closet that no one has ever been able to determine if he had any sexual relationships at all.
Image: Marsden Hartley - Movement, Bermuda, 1916, oil on board, Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia