1877 -1943 · Maine, New York, Berlin and Europe

Military symbols, Maine mountains and dense color make Marsden Hartley an essential and deeply personal figure of American modernism.

Marsden Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, in 1877 and died in Ellsworth in 1943. After studying in Cleveland and then in New York, he discovered European modernisms thanks to Alfred Stieglitz, who devoted his first personal exhibition to him at the gallery 291 in 1909. His first landscapes of Maine transformed hills and mountains into colorful, almost spiritual masses. Hartley then traveled to Paris and then to Berlin, where the avant-garde, music, cubism and expressionism disrupted his language. Between 1913 and 1915, he painted powerful abstract compositions made of numbers, flags, crosses, checkerboards and military insignia. german officer loved by the artist and killed at the start of World War I; the public code of the uniform thus becomes an intimate memorial. After the war, Hartley led a traveling life between the United States, France, Germany and Mexico. After the war, Hartley painted still lifes, portraits, landscapes, athletes and popular figures, while writing poetry and essays. In the 1930s, he returned permanently to Maine and claimed the title of painter of that state. In the 1930s, he returned permanently to Maine and claimed the title of painter of that state. Mountains, waves, fishermen and portraits of artists like Albert Pinkham Ryder acquired a rough monumentality. Its dense touch and dark color connect landscape, desire, mourning and identity in a major work of modernism american. The "Marsden Hartley" selection notably compares Abstraction (Military Symbols) and Abstraction. His reading favors figures.

At Hartley, the emblem is never decorative: number, flag, mountain or face condense an entire emotional memory.