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.
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)
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.
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.”
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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