O�Keeffe Museum puts Hartley into analysis.
Sometimes, late at night, especially after viewing art exhibitions born of extensive research, I pray that I never leave anything behind that is significant enough to encourage retrospective, post-mortem psychoanalysis. Not that Heather Hole, who is assistant curator at the Georgia O�Keeffe***image1*** Museum, has done sloppy work by placing the paintings of Marsden Hartley on the couch in order to generate insight into American modernism�she�s assembled a gut-wrenching grouping of Hartley�s works on New Mexico and uses them as the backdrop to describe both a painter�s personal evolution and a dynamic vignette of early 20th century art history.
Still, sometimes one wants a painting to be a painting, not a key insight into the artist�s tortured soul. And who wants the pain in one�s own life to be summed up with institutional-speak like �World War I�caused the death of a man [Hartley] cared for deeply��?
If one is going to discuss the loneliness and despair in Hartley�s paintings, instead of making vague allusions to a source, why not say that Hartley and Karl von Freyburg were as gay as the day is long and there was nothing they liked better than to wake up with their two man-bodies intertwined and sweaty with sex beneath a heavy blanket in the German winter? Apparently such language is not suitable for grant applications. Aside from the cowardice of officialdom however, Hole�s text and curation are first rate, with the caveat that not everyone will have much use for Hartley�s paintings.
The Hartley exhibition currently at the O�Keeffe Museum displays works made between 1918 and 1924, initially in pastel and eventually in oil paint. Notably, Hartley�s later works were done as recollections; they are not strict landscapes but his memories of Western landscapes, as he painted in New York and Berlin, overlayed on his own stubborn sense of abstraction.
It is this idea of the remembrance of place, especially in contrast to the viewer�s own memories, that most intrigues in the exhibition. To look at this Western landscape, so much more embedded in my own skin than any other territory, through Hartley�s eyes is a complex and emotional, even defensive, process.
Surely I have gazed on more or less the same arroyos, pocked with the deep ***image2***shadows cast by low scrub in the late afternoon, and covered by the saturated, gradient blue of a heavily breathing sky, but my own memory could not be more different from Hartley�s. His hills are as ovoid as odalisques, his middle grounds occasionally ripple with verdant lies and he inflicts a kind of unlikely emerald tone onto sage and juniper. And these are in the works he made with the land in front of him. To me, it is an angular and more harshly defined landscape that sits around us and I wonder if these are different ways of seeing, or the result of 90 years of industrial pollution edging into the sky, erosion chiseling the land and drought tempering the color.
Hartley�s later paintings, especially those made in Berlin beginning in 1923, are much closer representations of New Mexico. They may have become brooding and symbolic for personal reasons of loss and sorrow, as Hole explains in support materials, but they are also simply better paintings, particularly because this American West is itself brooding and given to symbolism.
There are stand-out works that achieve the status of great paintings, such as �Landscape Fantasy, 1923,� but Hartley�s chunky-style soup palette and insistence that he build landscape as abstract form�or that land is the ultimate abstraction�are tiresome indulgences that burden much of his work. Leaving behind the analysis of Hartley�s memory in terms of what his paintings may or may not represent, it has always been difficult to accept belligerent, macho paint handling�squeezed from the tube and worked without obvious care�as an indicator of depth and passion. In this regard, Hartley is as guilty as any of the modernists and abstract expressionists who followed him, only generally less capable in his brutishness.
Too often, the passion for the West that comes through in his words (�I have washed all old blood off in the desert. It�s the place for dead things. The sun burns them away�) fails to come through in his paintings. When Hartley�s works respect the sky as partner to the land, and when he opens himself to varying depths of field and a variety of shadows and horizons, the work succeeds both as landscape and, as is so heavily suggested, as psychological interior. When his �abstract� geometries are too predictable, his palette too bleak and muddied and his sky worked too plain, his paintings are almost difficult to look at.
Ultimately, however, the paintings are honest and present enough to provoke, and mixed reactions are often more satisfying than uniform awe or distaste.
Marsden Hartley and the West
is the O�Keeffe Museum doing what it does best: using the combination of well-crafted exhibitions and impeccable research to educate and stimulate ideas about American modernism and the complicated series of events and ideas that made O�Keeffe�s own career possible.
