Marsden Hartley,
at the Wadsworth Atheneum,
Hartford, January–April 2003.
Visiting Europe for the first time in 1912, Marsden Hartley reacted to Picasso’s recent Analytical Cubist paintings with the excitement of someone who has found something he can use. In those paintings, Picasso fragmented the traditional still life or portrait into dynamic shards, producing compositions that harmonized abstractly, but also, like puzzles, demanded solutions. The coded message was beautiful in itself; to appreciate the work fully, however, the viewer had to work on his own to crack the code.
Although he was in his mid-thirties at the time of that initial European sojourn, Hartley had still not landed on a convincing manner. He had donned styles—Ryder, Matisse, Cézanne, Segantini—but they remained costumes. In the difficult formalism of Cubism, Hartley discovered the vocabulary to express his deepest sentiments. Modernism was providential for an artist who felt compelled to utter a message that he feared might be understood.
To his heterosexual friends, Hartley hinted broadly at his homosexuality. He could sound like a Jamesian character, a Lambert Strether or John Marcher, tormenting himself with the question of whether he is failing to live to the utmost. Living fully to Hartley meant experiencing sex and, if possible, love. Soon after arriving in Paris in 1912, he wrote to his longtime friend and dealer, Alfred Stieglitz, that the time would come “when one can only wish to have lived” and so “one must embrace one’s youth eagerly while one has it—and my real youth is now with me.” He was then 35. A year later, the elation of being abroad had fizzled out, and he was suddenly feeling old. “I am not happy interiorly and this as far as I can see cannot be changed,” he wrote Stieglitz. “Like every other human being I have longings which through tricks of circumstances have been left unsatisfied…and the pain grows stronger instead of less and it leaves one nothing but the role of spectator in life watching life go by—having no part of it but that of spectator.”
A visual artist can achieve much as a spectator. Cézanne, who was one of Hartley’s heroes, demonstrated the power of the persistent gaze. Hartley, however, was not that sort of artist. In his best work, the regard of the exterior world is so thoroughly tinged with self-regard that even the landscapes and still lifes come off as self-portraits. Another of Hartley’s idols, Picasso, would later, in the Synthetic Cubist paintings of the 1930s, create still lifes in which apples swelled like breasts and table pedestals curved like interlocking limbs. But whereas Picasso radiated sexuality, Hartley stewed in it. The libidinal energy that animates his best abstractions is hidden.
In an unfinished memoir, which was probably never intended for publication, Hartley wrote, “I began somehow to have curiosity about art at the time when sex consciousness is fully developed and as I did not incline to concrete escapades I of course inclined to abstract ones, and the collecting of objects which is a sex expression took the upper hand.” Rarely has the expression “of course” seemed less appropriate. To Hartley, however, the convoluted notion of collection and assemblage as a form of sexual expression came naturally. He understood that this erotic emotion gave his breakthrough “War Motif” or “German Officer” paintings their force.
These paintings, which Hartley produced during his first European stay, remain his most famous works. In our unbuttoned and prurient age, they are routinely explained as memorials to his German lover felled in the early days of the First World War. In fact, Karl von Freyburg, the slain officer, was more likely a love object, not a lover. (As Barbara Haskell noted in the pioneering Hartley retrospective that she curated two decades ago at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Freyburg used the formal pronoun in his letters to “Mr. Hartley.” Years after his death, Hartley wrote him a letter in which he recorded a dream of their “intended relation.” ) Intensely specific yet mysteriously veiled, the memorial paintings that Hartley created in the months following Freyburg’s death combine standard, immediately recognizable trappings (the Iron Cross, the German flag) with arcane identifiers (the dead man’s initials and regiment number). Two portraits included in the recent Hartley retrospective at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford depict the white feather helmet and chin understrap of a German officer’s dress uniform; in place of the face, there is only a number.
When you see a number, you naturally wonder: Why that number? Infatuated with both modernity and mysticism, Hartley took a kabbalistic interest in numbers, and it is tempting to try to decipher them: in the New Age avant la lettre stuff that he devoured enthusiastically, the 9 is said to denote constant regeneration, for instance, and the 8 cosmic transcendence. The number 8 is particularly prominent. In Painting No. 49, Berlin, two phallic forms emblazoned “8” are boring into the shako-covered head, also labeled with an 8, and an equally prevalent curlicue that resembles the letter E is, to my mind, an unsprung 8. Discerning eights everywhere, I was unwittingly emulating Hartley. Writing to Stieglitz from Berlin in 1913, Hartley remarked that he was “seeing eight-pointed stars here by the thousands” and noted “a mystical presentation of the number 8 as I get it from everywhere in Berlin.” Since Hartley’s initial is the eighth letter of the alphabet, I began to think I might be breaking a hitherto uncracked code. The recurrence of the 8 seemed too obsessive to allude merely to the Kaiser’s star and too individual to signify cosmic transcendence. In Sea View—New England (1934), Hartley even inserted an 8 beneath his signature initials. Looking at one of his most powerful paintings of that period, Eight Bells Folly, Memorial for Hart Crane, of 1933, I became even more convinced that I was onto something, since the sailing ship (Crane jumped to his death from such a vessel) bears a double 3 (as in the third letter of the alphabet) and the cloudy portal towards which it sails is emblazoned “8,” as is a marker in the waves. But 33 was Crane’s age at his death; and in a letter to a friend, Hartley disclosed that that was his intended reference. From the recurrent use of Freyburg’s age of 24 in the German Officer paintings, one knows that he cared about such things.
But how much do I care about such things? Not much. Like the gyres of Yeats, the numerology of Hartley is grit for the oysterlike production of pearls. Take away the oyster and all that’s left is grit. In the catalogue to the Hartford show, Jonathan Weinberg, describing the crudely drawn capital letters that appear in three Hartley still lifes from 1916, astutely notes, “They insist that the images are more than decorative arrangements of objects and shapes. They ask the viewer to read, even if they say nothing.” They pose a riddle without offering the possibility of a solution. It’s understandable that Hartley felt a great affinity for Crane, whom he saw in Mexico not long before the poet’s suicide. Crane, too, embedded secret allusions in his work, like fragments in a highly wrought reliquary. No one could be expected to recognize, for instance, that the mentions of islands and of San Salvador in Crane’s great poem sequence, “Voyages,” allude to the fascination that the poet’s lover, Emil Opffer, had for a sunken city off the San Salvador coast. Indeed, the sexual love that is the subject of “Voyages” is itself kept obscure—much tossing and pounding with the lights dimmed low.
Of course, opaque references abound in the works of Eliot, Joyce, Pound, and other modernists; but most of the obscurities in those writers can, with sufficient dictionaries and encyclopedias, be deciphered, and when they cannot be, they are often beside the point. For the Homosexual Modernists like Hartley and Crane, however, the combination of a beautiful formalism and opaque subject matter produces the disquieting sensation that something urgent is being conveyed that we are not quite able to grasp. Hartley’s numbers perform exactly the opposite function of Jasper Johns’s; in Johns, the familiarity and meaninglessness of the numerals allow the painter to explore form divested of content, and to create beauty patently through technique. Hartley’s cryptic numerology is equally removed from the famous The Figure 5 in Gold, a painting by Charles Demuth, which duplicates the sensation that William Carlos Williams described in a poem about a speeding fire truck. Hartley’s symbols and numbers are neither impersonal nor illustrational. They are confessional.
And then he abandoned them. Forced to leave Berlin because of the First World War, Hartley remained an ardent if closeted German sympathizer. In the catalogue to his 1914 New York show, he wrote defensively that the German Officer paintings contained “no hidden symbolism whatsoever.” Of course, that was untrue; however, what they were widely criticized for was their Germanic slant, not their homoerotic one. Still, the unfriendliness of the reviewers may have helped push the thin-skinned painter to set aside his symbols. He turned his hand to still life and pure geometric abstraction, and then returned to his earlier passion, landscape. These landscapes were more original than any he had done before. Writing to Stieglitz in 1922 about the “remembered landscapes,” which were inspired by an earlier trip to New Mexico, he declared that they were “for the first time in my life—almost without me in them.” Another untrue statement. What galvanizes these paintings—and the even greater Dogtown ones done in Gloucester, Massachusetts, in the Thirties—is Hartley’s manifest presence in the lowering clouds, the compressed boulders, the twisted trees. Often depicting sublime mountains, lakes, and forests, these paintings are suffused with libidinal energy. Perhaps what he meant is that they are truly sublimations. In them, there is no residue to analyze.
Late in his life, Hartley fell in love again, harder than he had since his infatuation with Freyburg. The object this time was a young fisherman, with whose family Hartley lived for a stretch in Nova Scotia. The affair was probably consummated. In her catalogue essay to the earlier Whitney show, Haskell quotes from an unpublished story that Hartley wrote about Alty Mason: “He lives utterly for the consummate satisfaction of the flesh, the kind of flesh making no difference …You must be prepared for the eruption of his vesuvius, for his laval heats and flows will inevitably inundate your careful and calm city.” It sounded very promising, and Hartley was planning to set up housekeeping with Alty; but once again, things ended tragically. Alty was drowned at sea, along with his brother and cousin. The emotional jolt propelled Hartley’s art in a new direction, with an emphasis on portraits and figure studies that were often imbued with a sexual content. Along with the remarkable, moving portraits that he made of the Mason family, Hartley painted a self-portrait which is both blatant and coded. In it, his hair is bleached blond and his lips are rouged. On the chest of his sleeveless undershirt, a man with a bit of cloth covering his nakedness assumes a crucified position. Instead of a cross, he is splayed against the figure of a muscleman. The portrait subject’s blue eyes (Hartley’s most striking physical feature) are pierced by arrows at the same angle as the two phallic penetrators in the Painting No. 49, Berlin.
In his sixties by that time, Hartley may no longer have worried about what people might think. He painted what he wanted. His late work is full of scenes on the beach, in the locker rooms, and on the Maine docks. Looking today at these worshipful paintings of hairy-chested, muscular men in the briefest of briefs, we need no magic decoder. In the late Thirties and early Forties, however, as America prepared to go to war again, the public viewed the celebration of masculinity as a form of patriotism. The newspapers that denounced the German Officer paintings as pro-Hun applauded Hartley’s final work as pro-American. Hartley could lovingly paint the hypertrophied young men he adored. As with Poe’s purloined letter, the message was lying in plain sight. Nobody noticed.
Arthur Lubow writes about the arts for The New York Times Magazine and other publications.
