An In-Depth Look at Marsden Hartley

“Marsden Hartley: American Modern” presents a legendary artistic trailblazer in depth. Visiting Pepperdine University’s Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, the traveling survey offers some 50 impressive examples of his paintings and works on paper.

A member of Alfred Stieglitz’s legendary New York gallery 291, Hartley’s contemporaries included Georgia O’Keeffe, Arthur Dove and John Marin. His circle of friends encompassed everyone from Gertrude Stein to Eugene O’Neill and Hart Crane. So many books on American art include a reproduction of Hartley’s 1914 painting “Portrait of a German Officer” that it has become an icon of the genre. In short, this is an artist of major stature and considerable familiarity.

How curious, then, to realize that the present exhibition is the first Hartley compendium ever seen hereabouts, making the show a big treat and an imperative visit for interested parties. It was originated by the University of Minnesota, which has the luck to possess the largest single collection of Hartley’s work. Its Weisman Art Museum, like Pepperdine’s, is named for the Southern California collector and is housed in a building designed by architect Frank Gehry.

If the show seems tardily arrived, the wait created certain advantages. A catalog essay by Weisman museum curator Patricia McDonnell has more than the usual historical hindsight. Thanks to recent changes in social attitudes, she’s able to write frankly about Hartley’s homosexuality. The artist himself, she says, was obliged to keep mum about that on pain of artistic ruin and criminal prosecution. McDonnell concludes, “As a gay man, he had to thwart self-expression severely.”

She also links Hartley’s sexual orientation to shifts in his art and a peripatetic style of life that carried him zigzagging from Maine, where he was born in 1877, to Cleveland, New York, Boston, Paris, Berlin, New Mexico, California, Mexico, Bermuda, Nova Scotia and finally back to Maine, where he died in 1943.

McDonnell is clearly interested in fitting Hartley into the panorama of his times. She speculates plausibly, for example, that the carnage of World War I disillusioned Hartley into one change of style while America’s postwar neo-isolationism triggered a shift to a more conservative, regionalist approach. It’s an interesting hypothesis sometimes contradicted by the actual work.

Seen piecemeal, Hartley does come across a bit scattered. Viewed in the present ensemble, he’s remarkably consistent. Hartley always shows much of the sheer visual power he so greatly admired in Cezanne.

Like any artist, he grew and changed, but as he matured the results are uniformly muscular and look like the work of one man reacting passionately to what he sees and what’s on his mind. Anywhere along the line you can call him a Symbolic Expressionist and it sticks in the same way his imagery seems nailed to the canvas.

The work is uniformly interesting, but four emblematic portraits make the case. “Portrait,” from about 1914, is part of the “German Officer” series Hartley made in Berlin. The artist fell in love with the town, and a couple of military officers. One was killed early in the war. The painting is said to be an homage to the fallen man, but the picture isn’t mournful. It celebrates German military regalia in accents that are, if anything, those of scathing Dada wit, amused and furious at the absurd beauty of war and death. It looks like a deadly serious precursor of Pop.

“One Portrait of One Woman,” from 1916, obliquely depicts Gertrude Stein. The symmetrical composition is united by a peaked arch in yellow and white. The central icon is Stein’s blue teacup resting on a checkered cloth. Under it is lettered “MOI” standing for Stein’s famous ego. Hartley’s affection is as unmistakable as his catty wit.

Yet Hartley shows no sign of being emotionally circumscribed. “Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane” (1933) was painted shortly after artist and poet met in Mexico. Crane committed suicide on the boat home. Hartley reacted with the nightmare image of a schooner plowing through a tidal wave that engulfs a giant, screaming shark man. The artist’s ferocity is only tempered by the turgid weight of his mourning. The work bears an odd resemblance to the late imagery of Philip Guston.

Hartley responded to another drowning in 1939 with “Adelard the Drowned, Master of the Phantom.” The subject was Alty Mason, a member of a Nova Scotia family with whom the artist stayed and from whom he found affectionate companionship when he was on a retreat. Mason and two relatives were killed in a boating accident. The painting loses nothing of its symbolic force by being relatively realistic. It was one of many late-Hartley paeans to the heroic simplicity he found in his native geography.

Hartley’s work just doesn’t look expressively thwarted.

* “Marsden Hartley: American Modern,” Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, 24255 Pacific Coast Highway, Malibu; through Aug. 2, closed Mondays. (310) 456-4851.