The Poster Portraits V: Marsden Hartley (Cont.)

Hartley rarely stayed in one place for any length of time, lurching from Taos to Europe to New York to Mexico to Maine, and back. He spent his final years in Maine, painting dark scenes of brooding mountains which echo his earlier paintings of mountains in New Mexico, but which are considered among the finest examples of his work. A return now to Demuth’s poster portrait can better enable us to identify some of the elements reflective of Hartley’s life and his paintings. The mountain in the background could refer to several of Hartley’s Maine mountain landscapes as well as others from New Mexico, many of which have tree stumps or tall cacti, and one of which is a snowy winter scene. The choice of the anthurium and the camelia were probably inspired by Hartley’s painting Still Life with an Eel, painted in 1917, shortly after their return from Bermuda, (and which was owned by their mutual friend, poet William Carlos Williams). Demuth further insinuates himself into this study by labeling the head of the cane in the foreground with his initials. Does the cane pointing to the vividly colored, sexually charged anthurium indicate a relationship between the two friends? What about the ring and the rather deflated camellia lying on a strange flat shape? The shape could be read as a cross-an iron cross?-and the ring is obscured by the transparent curtain, allusions perhaps to the death of the young Karl van Freyburg to whom Hartley might well have given, or planned to give, a ring. Well. Pointless speculations, silly mind games or not, Demuth might well have had both himself and Freyburg in mind in a symbolic depiction of his friend. Jonathan Weinberg, in his 1993 study of Demuth and Hartley, Speaking for Vice, points out that the sexual quality of the anthurium is counterposed with a bleak landscape suggestive of impotence and death. For Weinberg, “with a minimum of means-juxtaposing and condensing elements from Hartley’s own painting-Demuth suggested.. . .one of the central characteristics of Hartley’s art: his habitual presentation of desire in a context that included death." Marsden Hartley died in Maine in 1943, after an illness, at the age of 66. Although he was never widely known as an artist before his death, he was appreciated by a diverse group of artists and intellectuals for his originality, his experimentation in both realistic and non-representational modes. Gertrude Stein had written to Stieglitz as early as 1913, that he was doing something with his art that “keeps your attention freshened” (although Hartley remembered that she’d said, “at last, an original American”). But his reputation both with critics and the public has strengthened as the decades have passed, and he is now considered by many to be a seminal figure in twentieth century American art. Hartley’s output was, however, not confined to painting. He read widely and wrote extensively on topics in both art and literature. He published three volumes of poetry, numerous articles in such journals and magazines as Camera Work, Dial, and Vanity Fair, and in 1921 published a book, Adventures in the Arts, which is provocative, and intelligent, written in his idiosyncratic style. His “Somehow a Past, a Sequence of Memories Not to be Called an Autobiography,” left in manuscript at his death, along with two long, autobiographical poems, was published in 1995, edited by Susan Elizabeth Ryan. In 1935, Hartley wrote an essay called “Farewell Charles,” in memory of his recently deceased friend. He described Demuth’s appearance and manner, his “patrician hands,” his “special sort of ambling walk,” developed to deal with his lameness, and his “quaint, incisive sort of wit with an ultra-sophisticated, post eighteen-ninety touch to it.” And he wrote, “I am still wanting the vibrant companionship of those who have brought either richness or fun, or both, into my life." - Priscilla Oppenheime