The Poster Portraits V: Marsden Hartley

(Note: This is the fifth in a series of articles about Charles Demuth’s associations with the subjects of his poster portraits.) Marsden Hartley describes his first meeting with Charles Demuth in his autobiographical fragment, “Somehow a Past: A Sequence of Memories Not to be Called an Autobiography.” It was early in 1912 when Hartley made his first trip to Europe and was staying at the D™me in Paris, feeling bewildered and somewhat alienated from the group of Americans “presumably studying but playing billiards mostly.” He ate most of his meals at Thomas’s restaurant, just around the corner, where he began to meet a more compatible group of people, including the sculptor Arnold Ršnnebeck, his “first German friend.” “There was just one place left at Thomas’ one evening and an American came up and asked if he could have it and we said ‘yes.’ Then he said something funny - and I said ‘I guess you better come here all the time,’ and it has been like that ever since with Charles Demuth and me.” Born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877 to a poor immigrant family, Hartley left school at the age of fifteen to go to work. His mother had died when he was eight, certainly one of the formative experiences of his life, although he was close to his stepmother, whose maiden name he adopted as his first name. When the family moved to Cleveland, he began to take art classes while working, eventually studying at the Cleveland School of Art. A scholarship from a wealthy patron of the school enabled him to study in New York, at William Merritt Chase’s school and at the National Academy of Design. He returned to Maine to paint during the summers and eventually became a member of the Alfred Stieglitz circle of artists in New York. By the time he met Charles Demuth in Paris, he had had two one-man exhibitions at Stieglitz’s 291 Gallery. Demuth and Hartley were in the same company often after their meeting in Paris, where they painted, made the acquaintance of artists, and visited Gertrude Stein, to whom Hartley formed a strong attachment. Demuth also visited Ršnnebeck in Berlin, presumably while Hartley was there. Demuth returned to America in the spring of 1913, Hartley after the outbreak of World War I. They spent their summers in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, where they shared a house in 1916 and joined several avant-garde writers and artists who worked, cavorted, and put on plays by Eugene O’Neill and others. As Hartley wrote, “the best of a good time was had by all.” The following year, Demuth joined Hartley in Bermuda, where both enjoyed its “immense charm.” Their friendship endured until Demuth’s death, and they were forever linked when O’Neill immortalized the Hartley-Demuth duo in his 1928 play, Strange Interlude, in the character of Charles Marsden. Perhaps the sheer curtain blowing across the window that frames Demuth’s study for a poster portrait of Hartley, done in 1924, is a reminder of those halcyon days in Provincetown and Bermuda. This study, like those of poet Wallace Stevens and Eugene O’Neill among his poster portrait series, seems never to have been completed. It is little more than a sketch in graphite and watercolor on paper, with “Hartley” written in bold letters vertically down the left side of the window frame, and the planned elements of the painting roughed in. The colors to be used, and some of the objects as well, are labeled in pencil, and a bit of the color is daubed in. A potted anthurium with one bright red blossom and a long yellow stamen on the window ledge on the left side continues the strong vertical, reinforced by the head of a cane leaning on the ledge and pointing to the pot. A camelia (labeled as such), and a ring lie on the ledge, while out the window a blasted tree stump looks out on a scene of mountains in the snow, blue sky, and white clouds. Compared to the other poster portraits, this one, with its deep space and carefully chosen objects, seems less an experiment in abstraction and more of a symbolic personal portrait. After World War I, the idea of freeing portraiture from its traditional focus on likenesses was in the air, and many artists other than Demuth, such as Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp, played with the concept of portraits in either abstract or symbolic terms. Hartley himself called his first abstract paintings, in 1912, “portraits of moments,” and went on to meld landscape with portraiture, as in his later “mountain portraits.” But among Hartley’s most original canvases are the l914 series of portraits of a German officer. These paintings, showing influences of Fauvism, German Expressionism and Cubism, mass brightly colored shapes symbolic of aspects of German military uniforms: epaulets, spurs, gold braid, helmets, the iron cross, and regimental flags on a black background. The initials “K.v.F.” appearing in them refer to Karl von Freyburg, Ršnnebeck’s cousin, to whom Hartley was deeply attracted. The death of Freyburg, who was killed early in the war and was awarded the iron cross, was another in a series of black moments which seemed to follow Hartley and blight his life. The sadnesses of his childhood, and his difficulty in coming to terms with his homosexuality, as well as later losses and illnesses, seemed to prevent him from sustaining relationships, and turned him into a wanderer.  (continued)