how i got it: marsden hartley’s portraits of love
by Douglas Messerli
Dieter
Scholz, ed, with essays by Ilene Susan Fort, Thomas W. Gehtgens, Kaitlyn Hogue
Mellini, Alexis Pooth, Bruce Robertson, Thomas Weißbrich, and Cornelia Wieg Marsden Hartley: The German Paintings 1913-1915
(Berlin: Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin and the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art) / The show I saw was at LACMA from August 3 to November
30, 2014.
Ever since I was a young adult, I have admired
the paintings of Marsden Hartley, particularly the seemingly abstract works of
half-circles, squares, crosses, and numbers, and the Native-American influenced
works which have recently been gathered together in a show representing his “German
Paintings” from 1913-1915. I don’t think I comprehended in these early days
that these works had mostly been painted during his stay in Berlin and
elsewhere in Germany during that period in which he had first traveled to
Europe. I first saw these works, one by one, over the years at the Wadsworth Athenaeum
Museum of Art (Military, 1913), when
I attended a conference there on the early US magazine The Dial; the Whitney Museum of Art (Forms Abstracted, 1913); the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
(Painting No. 47, Berlin, 1914-1915),
where my companion worked as a curator; at the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Berlin Abstraction, 1914-1915); the
University of Iowa Art Museum (E,
1915); and National Gallery of Art (The
Aero, 1914). In 1985 I gained permission to use the image of his Indian Fantasy, 1914 on the cover of my
publication of Johnny Stanton’s Indian fantasy fiction, Mangled Hands. And I recall attending a rather excruciatingly
academic analysis of Hartley’s poetry in comparison with his art one year at
the College Art Association with Howard and University of Maryland professor
Sue Green at the University of Delaware.
I was delighted, accordingly, to be able
to see many of his German works brought together in the show Marsden Hartley: The German Paintings
1913-1915, co-organized by the Nationalgalerie, Staaliche Museen zu Berlin and
the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2014.
After visiting the LACMA galleries showing
these paintings three times, and reading the excellent accompanying catalogue,
edited by Staatliche Museen curator Dieter Scholz, I feel that these previous
rather mysterious works are now fairly able to be read. In saying that, I am
not arguing against the spiritual values that these works attest to nor
disagreeing with Hartley’s own assessment that instead of representing a
specific accumulation of symbolic content his works of this period arose from
an intuitive abstraction that could not be straightforwardly “read.” As Hartley wrote of his New York gallerist
and friend Alfred Stieglitz in 1912:
I am shutting out all superficial
attachments and associations—
all ideas except those of mind
and those of the spirit. I find it
necessary for me. I find growing
in me and I think to more
purpose—a recurrence of former religious
aspirations—
taking a finer form in personal
expression—so much for
art and idealism. (letter,
October 31, 1912)
Yet after reading the catalogue’s
intelligent essays by Scholz, LACMA curator Ilene Susan Fort, Thomas Weißbrich, Kaitlyn Hogue Mellini,
and others one can begin to untangle what might first appear in these
German-influenced paintings as colors, shapes, numerals, crosses and esoteric
images, to recognize them as a significant private iconography relating to
Hartley’s utter joy of and fascination with the Prussian military daily on
parade in Berlin and, more specifically, his homosexual love of the Prussian
officer Carl von Freyburg and his close friendship with Freyburg’s cousin,
Arnold Rönnebeck, at whose home Hartley stayed upon first arriving in Germany.
Together, the three aligned themselves as what they described as a “beautiful
triangle,” traveling together to Münich and elsewhere. While it is fairly
evident that Hartley and von Freyburg did have a homosexual relationship, Rönnebeck’s
sexuality during this period remains undiscussed; he later married his wife
Louise and lived for years in Denver, where he served as a major artistic
force, heading, for a while, the Denver Art Museum, and purchasing some of that
museum’s major early works, including a Maillol sculpture, drawings by Matisse,
and etchings by Picasso. Yet it is clear that Rönnebeck played a major role in
Hartley’s infatuation with Berlin and is represented by personal aspects of his military costume and
in other images of Hartley’s work of this period. Von Freyburg, who was killed
early in World War I, the earliest years of which Hartley continued to live in
Berlin, both he and Rönnebeck working together to memorialize through Hartley’s
art, their dear friend.
In a brief essay by Bruce Robertson, “Marsden
Hartley and Gay Berlin,” the critic makes clear—primarily through the writings
of the early gay pioneer Magnus Hirschfeld—just how open gay sexuality was in
pre-war Berlin. A more recent study, just published in 2014, by Robert Beachy, Gay Berlin indirectly argues that the
Berlin in which Hartley had suddenly landed was not just the most openly
gay-friendly city in the world, but contained a community of individuals that
in their definitions of and arguments for gay and other sexualities, helped to
form “modern identity.” In particular, Beachy substantiates and reinforces the
close relationship between the Prussian military and the gay community. Apparently,
a large proportion of the ubiquitous Berlin-based officers and soldiers were
involved in male prostitution in order to supplement their income. Hartley’s
involvement with a military officer, clearly did not involve prostitution
(Hartley had little money to even rent a studio and eat), but Beachy’s
revelations substantiate the close interconnections of Prussian militarism with
homosexual life in the German capitol. Particularly for figures who argued
against Hirschfeld’s feminized vision of homosexual life, such as Adolf Brand,
Benedict Friedlaender, and Herbert Stegemann, who posited, instead, a “masculinist”
view of homosexuality, the role of the military—with its bisexual
implications—was central to their gay identities. The great homosexuals of
history, they argued, were highly virile men who led legions of soldiers and
nations.*
Clearly, Hartley’s attraction to men shared
much with these outspoken figures. For Hartley, it appears, in retrospect, the
entire city, with its parading military figures, were central to his love and
admiration of life in Berlin. As he later wrote in Somehow a Past:
Those huge cuirassiers of the Kaiser’s special
guard—all
in white—white leather breeches skin tight—high
plain
enamel boots—those gleaming blinding medieval breast
plates
of silver and brass… There were the inspiring helmets
with the
imperial eagle and the white manes hanging
down—there was six foot of youth
under all this garniture—
everyone on a horse—and every horse white—this is how
I got it—and it went into an abstract picture of
soldiers
riding into the sun.
Certainly
Hartley wouldn’t be the first young man—hetero- or homosexual—transfixed by the
pomp and circumstance of beautifully uniformed males in precisionist maneuvers.
For a 35-year old Maine-born and bred, somewhat closeted gay male, the Berlin
of 1912-1913 was inevitably overwhelming.
If Hartley’s earliest abstract works
reference the usual transcendental images of Buddhas, flowers, mystical signs,
and open palmed-hands, by 1913 in Portrait
of Berlin he was incorporating military insignias and the image of von
Freyburg seated upon a horse, a picture of himself the officer sent to Hartley.
In The Warriors of the same year, the
von Freyburg figure appears again, along with an entire parade of the gleaming “white
knights” somewhat resembling a postcard image Hartley sent to his friend Gertrude
Stein that same year. The same von Freyburg image would appear again and again,
almost as a totem in his paintings of 1914: Portrait
Arrangement, Berlin Ante War, and
Himmel (1914-15). 
In his 1914 Portrait of a German Officer, a memorial of sorts to his recently
deceased lover, Hartley synthesized the personal elements of von Freyburg’s and
Rönnebeck’s military costumes in order to emblematically portray a “picture” of
the man he so loved. In a revelatory “key to the painting,” the writers of the
Marsden Hartley catalogue divulge almost every element of the painting: iron
cross, tip of the flag cover, shoulder boards, flags, lance pennant, cockade,
cuff braids, helmet, tunic collar, epaulet, lanyard, sash, and spur. What
seemed only as abstraction (and yet remains completely abstracted) becomes an iconographical
memento mori of love.
It’s interesting in Hartley’s
autobiographical description I quoted above, that he describes his memories of
the soldiers on parade as being something “he got” (“this is how I got it”), as
if suddenly, in passively witnessing the parade he was kicked in the gut or
that was suddenly sickened in his stomach, as if contracting a disease, or, one
can imaginatively speculate, as if an arrow had struck his heart. The soldier
and his uniform were almost one and the same: a masculine image to be idealized
and memorialized forever after. As he would later argue: “There is no hidden
symbolism whatsoever in them [his paintings]; there is no slight intention of
that anywhere. Things under observation, just pictures of any day, any hour. I
have expressed only what I have seen.”
Accordingly the other works he created
during this period, the remaining works of his German stay of 1914-1915 (Pyramid and Cross; Painting Number 49,
Berlin; Portrait; Painting No. 47, Berlin, etc) as well as
his Indian compositions of the same period, relate much more closely to the
landscapes and fantasies he painted upon his return to the United States and
throughout the rest of his life. If these early works appear to us (and are in some respects) abstractions, what
they are abstracted from remains transparent rather hidden. And Hartley’s art,
despite its avant-garde commitment, retains its close ties with realist or
representational painting.
If that may trouble some art historians
and everyday admirers who might rather have preferred to link Hartley’s works
to the European avant-garde and the later American Abstract Expressionists, it
also frees Hartley from the limitations that those links might require. Today
we can more fully see Hartley as a post-modern figure, closer to Gertrude Stein
and William Carlos Williams in his work than to Jackson Pollack or Franz Kline.
In short, Hartley uses abstraction more as a tool to synthesize his highly
emotional response to reality** than as an end in itself. Behind most of these
Berlin works, we realize, are flesh-and-blood individuals or, at the least,
concepts of noble beings (as in the Indian landscapes) which it would have been
dangerous, perhaps, to straight-forwardly portray in their bodily manifestation,
but yet whose essence, nonetheless, could be fully captured in the abstract.
*Although
I have no evidence that Hartley knew of the “masculinist” or the Männerbund
movements that had developed in Berlin by the time he arrived there (I have
done no personal research on Hartley), it would be highly likely that he would
have encountered these groups since they represented one of the serious alternatives
of the gay schisms of the period. Certainly, had von Freytag and others
indoctrinated Hartley in these debates, it might help to explain how Hartley
could have been able to later accommodate his outsider position as a homosexual
in the US with his sometimes anti-Semitic viewpoints and his rumored desire to
meet Hitler. Both the masculinists such as Brand and the Mànnerbund figures
such as Hans Büher combined their often misogynist theories, arguing for the virile male and male superiority, with
virulent anti-Semitism and the support of all-male youth groups such as the
Wandervogel Movement, members of whom addressed their often autocratic adult
groups leaders ( who, on occasion sexually abused the children under their
charge) with the term Führer, and
whose initiation ceremony began with a salute “Heil!” It is apparent that Hitler and his National Socialist party
adopted many of the rites and practices of these homoerotically-centered
organizations in establishing their organizational structures and appealing to
the German military. Indeed, many of Hitler’s followers, particularly the early
brownshirts, were homosexual. Of course, it is precisely those same
organizations and the individuals behind them who were destroyed through
Hitler’s personal homophobia. My comments are based on Robert Beachy’s Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). (See also the essay that follows on Luchino
Visconti’s film The Damned).
**This syntheized abstraction, obviously,
also connects Hartley more closely to Picasso and Braque and, more directly to
the Blaue Reiter artists whom he met in Germany, than to the Delaunays or
Morgan Russell, the later of whom Hartley observed to Stieglitz that he found
“dull.”
Los Angeles,
Decmeber 12, 2014
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