Marsden Hartley and the Volk

Maine has been the home of some of America’s greatest painters such as Rockwell Kent, Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth and – my personal favorite – John Marin. But these artists were not from Maine; as we say here: they were from away. In his watercolors Marin captured the beauty and violence of Maine’s rocky seacost, but he was a New Yorker, dividing his time between Manhattan and Maine. Marsden Hartley is the one great American modernist we in Maine can call our own. Hartley (1877-1943) was born in the central Maine city of Lewiston, and he died in Ellsworth, Maine.  He aspired to become known as "the painter from Maine" and sought to capitalize on the Maine brand as a popular tourist destination. His work is today seen in the context of the American Regionalist movement in painting, which celebrated the diverse landscapes and people across the country.  Hartley desired to see his name attached to Maine just as Georgia O’Keefe’s name is connected to New Mexico, Thomas Hart Benton’s with Indiana and Missouri and Grant Wood’s with Iowa. But Hartley was much more complex than the folksy, backwoods persona he sought to cultivate.  And, in fact, the greatest influences on his art came not from his fellow American regionalist painters but from Germany.  This is what the art historian Donna Cassidy explores in her very interesting book: Marsden Hartley: Race, Region and Nation.

Hartley had several very productive encounters with Germany. In 1913 he was one of the first American painters to come into contact with Der Blaue Reiter group, and the time he spent with Kandinsky and Franz Marc would have a profound influence. Hartley was always attracted to mysticism, and the goal of the Der Blaue Reiter of finding the spiritual truth behind the painted object appealed to him.  The German Expressionists’ celebration of primitivism also led Hartley to discover the beauty and spirituality of Native American culture. Hartley remained in Germany even after the Great War started, and experienced the horrors of war after his great love interest Karl von Freyburg, a young officer, perished in one of the first battles of the war.  Out of grief, Hartley produced a series of highly original German Officer paintings.

Professor Cassidy ends her book with a chapter entitled "North Atlantic Folk and and Racial Discourse" which explores the impact of Hartley’s final visit to Germany in 1933 and 1934.  Hartley arrived in Bavaria shortly after the Nazi seizure of power and was excited by the "miles of flags and emblems" as well as the parades he saw everywhere.  I would very much like to read his letters from that stay, for there are not that many documents from non-Germans who experienced the early years of the Third Reich from the inside; Hartley’s letters would be a good addition to Oliver Lubrich’s book Reisen ins Reich 1933-1945.  Hartley was hardly a political ideologue and admitted he didn’t understand much about National Socialism, but he was tutored in this by none other than Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s Harvard-educated press secretary! What evidently did resonate with Hartley, and what Professor Cassidy discovered in her research, was the Nazi emphasis of the superiority of the Nordic race. Also, the Nazi fetish of the Aryan male body as the epitome of racial perfection appealed to Hartley’s gay sensibility.  Hartley found the same racial purity back in America among the woodcutters and fishermen of Maine. Anglo-Saxons or Yankees were at the top of his heirarchy of "whiteness". "As northerners, the North Atlantic folk were related, in Hartley’s eyes, to the light-filled Germans, the spritual, radiant northern race." (Cassidy) So Hartley was able to combine a modernist aesthetic with a reactionary worldview,  This knowledge casts Hartley’s regionalism – his bold landscapes, his portraits of rustic Maine folk – in an entirely new light.