posted February 08, 2009 02:33 PM         

Raptus
oil on canvas
Marsden Hartley (1877 - 1943)
American

Along with Arthur Dove (q.v.), John Marin (q.v.), and Georgia O'Keeffe (q.v.), Marsden Hartley is an important figure in the history of modern art in America. A native of Lewiston, Maine, Hartley studied painting first in Cleveland and then in New York City at the Chase School and the National Academy of Design. Initially, Hartley painted landscapes in an Impressionist style, but he began to turn toward Fauvism and more advanced modes after meeting Alfred Stieglitz (q.v.) in 1909. Intrigued by developments in Europe, Hartley traveled to France and Germany in 1912-13. Before long, he had settled in Berlin, where he associated with the city's avant-garde art community. During this period, Hartley painted some of his most memorable early paintings, including a series of semi-abstract compositions based on the colorful pageantry of the German military.

Following his return to the United States in late 1915, Hartley traveled from place to place in search of new inspiration. He visited Bermuda with Charles Demuth and then traveled to New Mexico, where he painted fantasy compositions based on Southwestern motifs. Back in Europe by 1921, Hartley lived for a time in Berlin before moving to southern France in 1925. He continued to travel restlessly throughout the 1930s, living in Mexico and Germany and spending summers in Bermuda, Massachusetts, and Nova Scotia. After the drowning deaths of two young friends in Nova Scotia, Hartley in 1937 returned to his home state of Maine, where he painted some of his greatest works. The artist died of heart failure in Ellsworth, Maine, in 1943.

Raptus belongs to a group of "mystical" compositions executed by Hartley during the period 1912-13. At this time, Hartley was strongly influenced by esoteric religion, both Western and Eastern. Although he was not a member of any particular church or faith group, Hartley was attracted to the writings of mystics such as Jakob Bohme and scholars like William James, whose treatise The Varieties of Religious Experience was claimed by the artist as the underlying source of the imagery in Raptus.

Raptus is a symbolic composition featuring a series of overlapping circles disposed in triangular and targetlike configurations. Superimposed over the larger group of circles in the top half of the canvas is a small white triangle from which emanate what appear to be focused beams of light. Below is the Latin word "raptus," inscribed on a pedestal-like form. Red, yellow, and white predominate, suggesting warmth, energy and spiritual purity.

The abstract, symbolic aspects of Raptus are reinforced both by the painting's flatness and by its inclusion of the written word within the composition. While in Paris in 1912, Hartley studied the Cubist compositions of Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), gleaning from them new ways to approach his own subjects. Hartley, however, never attempted to follow Picasso but instead drew such elements from the Spanish painter's style as could be adapted to his own very different subject matter.

For Hartley, Raptus symbolized the mystical communion of God with man. William James described this bond as a state of bliss, or rapture, beyond the power of words to describe. Hartley felt that the visual arts could provide an answer where writing failed, and beginning with a single fiery word, he developed his interpretation of James's commentary into an elaborate synthesis of intellectually stimulating symbology and emotionally charged color. The interlinked groups of three circles in Raptus represent the trinity of the Godhead, as does the triangle, whose three sides form the most basic of polyhedral forms. The rays proceeding from the triangle may represent different aspects of a single divine Truth. Hartley's red, yellow, and white color scheme probably looks to the Russian modernist Vassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), who asserted that individual colors had metaphysical meaning. In his famous work, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Kandinsky asserted that red was the color of spiritual harmony, yellow the color of earthly things, and white the color of divine purity. Working with Kandinsky's definitions, Hartley hoped to restate the intellectual message of the painting in a more immediate and intuitive way.

The mystical paintings of 1912-13 gave way to more decorative compositions after Hartley moved to the German capital, Berlin, in 1914. However, the artist's interest in the metaphysical remained, forming a natural counterpart to the transcendent themes of his landscapes. In 1932 Hartley would combine the two in a series of symbolic portraits of mystics, made in Mexico while on a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Raptus was presented to the Currier Museum of Art in 1965 by photographer Paul Strand (q.v.) and his wife, Hazel.

posted February 08, 2009 02:45 PM         

19th Century American Sculpture
Pan of Rohallion , circa 1890
cast bronze

Frederick MacMonnies (1863 - 1937)
American

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According to Lorado Taft (1860-1936), a sculptor and contemporary of MacMonnies, Pan of Rohallion was the first of a series of "fanciful figures" created by the artist for his own amusement. Conceived as a fountain sculpture, the work was subsequently mass-produced in several reduced sizes. The Currier version is a small statuette cast in Paris by H. Ravard and measures almost fifteen inches in height. It portrays a young boy standing on a globe, laughing as he plays his double pipe. Eight small fish, originally designed to spout water, encircle and support the globe at regular intervals. The pose of the figure is rigorously symmetrical, conferring a note of dignified restraint that seems at odds with the impishness of MacMonnies's portrayal. Taft noted the discrepancy as well and seems to have concluded that it was a private joke on the part of the sculptor. With a good nature lacking in other critics, he assessed the pose as freshly "mock-heroic," the antic of a child rather than a classical god.

The classical inspiration, sinuous proportions, and expert modeling of the figure demonstrate MacMonnies's mastery of the French Beaux-Arts style, and for a number of critics, it was baffling and irritating that such talent should be wasted on the production of apparently silly sculpture. At the turn of the century, many held that sculpture should be edifying and morally uplifting. Pan of Rohallion is neither, and for Taft, its simple good humor and "irresponsibility" constituted a notable step forward from the ponderous academicism of the previous era. Others admired MacMonnies's innovation as well, and within a generation, the portrayal of emotions for their own sake -joy and love in particular- became normalized within American academic sculpture. A good example of this later work is Harriet Whitney Frishmuth's The Crest of the Wave (q.v.), also in the Currier collection.(1)

posted February 08, 2009 03:49 PM         

"...The earth is all I know of wonder."
- Marsden Hartley

Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) is widely recognized as one of America's greatest artists in the 20th Century because of his bold compositions that stopped short of abstraction, but rarely drama.

Like many artists, he was inconsistent and not all of his oeuvre is successful. To his great credit, however, he persevered with different themes and his intensity never wavered.
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His landscapes, wrote Ludington, were attempts "to convey his sense of the wonder of earth, at the same time attempting to articulate his awareness of the spiritual that came to him in the 'magic of dreams' and was filtered through his abundant imagination." "He struggled to comprehend and express creatively the tensions he perceived between the self and the spiritual work, between imagination, intellect, and nature as he understood them. Eventually he found settings that allowed him to immerse himself in what he called 'the mysticism of nature.' I these settings, influenced by all that he had read, he was compelled to create art from adversity and from the harshness and stolidness he felt to be inherent in the world. Forged from disparate elements, his work embodied modernism, making Hartley a significant representative of that major moment/movement in American sculpture," Ludington observed.

Self-taught and "remarkably learned," Hartley, Ludington continued, became "enamoured of the transcendentalists; Emerson, Thoreau, and soon after Whitman were his gods, even as he struggled with a severe case of New England Puritanism, which ran counter to his philosophical bent as well as to his homosexuality." Hartley had an exhibition at the Rowland Gallery in Boston in 1908 and came to the attention of artists Maurice and Charles Prendergast who wrote letters of introduction for Hartley to meet artists Robert Henri and William Glackens in New York. Glackens introduced Hartley to his Ash-Can School fellow artists and the next year Hartley met Alfred Stieglitz, whose 291 Gallery would become the epicenter of modern art in America and Hartley one of the thoroughbreds in its stable. With help from Stieglitz, Hartley went to Europe in 1912 and stayed for several years in Berlin where, Ludington notes, "he delved into Wassily Kandinsky's 'On the Spiritual in Art,' the works of Henri Bergson, and translations of the mystics Boehme, Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, and Ruysbroeck, to name but several of the writers whose ideas were helping to shape his thinking."

Hartley came to admire George Santayana, the philosopher, who had written about distinguishing "the edge of truth from the might of the imagination." Hartley, concerned about the egocentricity of artists, would soon write that he felt he had risen above "the worst defects" of the artistic "psychology": "After all what is visible is all we can seem to know and the rest is left to romanticism & to ecstasy."

posted February 08, 2009 03:52 PM         

Oil on canvas, 46 11/16 x 39 5/16 in. (118.6 x 99.7 cm)
Purchased with funds from the State of North Carolina, 75.1.4

Life as an expatriate painter in Berlin prompted Marsden Hartley to reflect upon his native country and his own identity as an American. The artist was troubled by what he judged to be the soulless greed and violence of modern industrial society. For Hartley the cure for a corrupt civilization was to be found in the rapturous embrace of the primitive.