Marsden Hartley
(1877-1943) was a writer and a spiritual seeker, as well as a
distinguished American painter. In his introduction to this
generously illustrated volume, Townsend Ludington explores the
relationships among Hartley's art, poetry, and essays. He traces
the philosophical and literary sources that nourished the artist's
evolving spiritual consciousness.
Raised in Lewiston, Maine, Hartley felt at odds
with life. A voracious reader, he educated himself and became
enamored of the transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry
David Thoreau, and, particularly, of Walt Whitman. He began
spending winters in New York City where he met and was befriended
by Alfred Stieglitz. He visited Europe but remained restless for
the right physical environment. Eventually returning to New
England, Hartley painted in Dogtown, Massachusetts, in the low
hills behind the port of Gloucester, and the stark landscape there
stimulated some of his most famous paintings.
Throughout his career, Hartley painted
landscapes and seascapes in which he tried to convey his sense of
the wonder of earth, at the same time attempting to articulate the
spiritual awareness that came to him in the "magic of
dreams." Consciously representative of modernism, Hartley
strove to express, as Wallace Stevens said, "not ideas about
the thing but the thing itself." He believed that the acts of
reading, writing, and painting gave significance to the world
accessible to his senses.
This book is published with the cooperation of
the Ackland Museum in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and the Babcock
Galleries in New York City.
Speaking
for Vice : Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden
Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde 
Seeking
the Spiritual : The Paintings of Marsden Hartley 
