Review: Marsden Hartley and His Maine Act

One of a series of paintings by Marsden Hartley of Maine - "Mt. Katahdin (Maine), Autumn #2."

The idea of an exhibition devoted to “Marsden Harley’s Maine” might sound a bit provincial, tethering one of America’s greatest painters to so much local-yokel lore. We don’t, after all, see shows devoted to Andy Warhol’s Pittsburgh, or Jackson Pollock’s Wyoming, which would likely be exercises in boosterism. Yet “Marsden Hartley’s Maine “ – which is currently on view at the Met Breuer outpost of the Metropolitan Museum, at 945 Madison Avenue – is a fascinating and powerful show that to my mind constitutes the best museum exhibition in New York right now.

The show sets out to give us a new Hartley – not the pioneering abstract painter who exhibited at the Armory Show in 1913, belonged to the Stieglitz circle, and helped modernize American art. Tellingly, the show omits what is probably Hartley’s his best-known painting, “Portrait of a German Officer” (1914), which you would not recognize as a portrait. A jangle of bright little targets and checkerboard flags, it was painted during his Berlin years and is believed to pay tribute to a male lover who died in the war.

Instead, here we get a less cosmopolitan artist, the Hartley of Lewiston, Maine, the dour and socially awkward son of a textile worker. His mother died when he was eight and his father sent him to live with relatives. After spending decades traveling among the capitals of art in both America and Europe, Hartley returned home to Maine in 1937, when he was sixty. At the time, Regionalism, conceived during the Depression years, remained the prevailing style in art, offering images of robust farmers and green hillsides as a form of moral uplift.

Hartley, at this point, threw off his modernist aspirations and became a Regionalist, declaring himself “the painter of Maine.” He adopted familiar local sights as his subjects – white lighthouses, red lobsters, neat piles of freshly cut lumber. Taking his cue from Cezanne’s many scenes of Mont Sainte-Victoire, he painted a series of views of Mount Katahdin, the tallest peak in the state.

Hartley’s instincts as a painter led him to monumentalize his subjects, making forms feel as weighty as boulders (and boulders as animated as people). He drenched everything with a psychological complexity. In his views of Mount Katahdin, trees are lined up like so many family members, and I was startled to discern “hidden figures” embedded in the land. In a painting from 1941, there is only one tree, and beside it stands what appears to be the giant head of a screaming boy, his mouth a blood-red oval. Elsewhere, I spotted Madame Cezanne seated in the middle of a cresting white wave.

The show will be traveling this summer to the Colby College Museum of Art, in Waterville, Maine, and clearly there is room for new views of the artist’s work. In the meantime, curator Randall R. Griffey of the Met, who contributes an excellent essay to the catalogue, is to be congratulated for outing Hartley as a Regionalist and proving that there is more to Regionalism than corn.