Marsden Hartley’s Maine at Home and Abroad

On Tues. March 7th at 6:30 p.m. in LPL’s Callahan Hall, Donna Cassidy (Professor of Art History and American & New England Studies at the University of Southern Maine) will be presenting a program on Lewiston-born artist Marsden Hartley. Cassidy’s talk is entitled Marsden Hartley’s Maine at Home and Abroad: The Local as Cosmopolitan. The event is free and open to the public.

This presentation is scheduled one week in advance of a major Hartley exhibition which opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City on March 15. Cassidy is a co-curator for that show which is entitled Marsden Hartley’s Maine. Following its close at the Met on June 18, the exhibition will travel to the Colby College Museum of Art where it will be on view from July 8 through November 12, 2017.

Included in the 2017 exhibition is Hartley’s oil painting, Shady Brook, which was completed in 1907 and donated by the artist that same year to the Lewiston Public Library. The painting has been on view at LPL since that date, however it is slated to leave for New York on Feb. 21.

Marsden Hartley began and ended his artistic career in Maine. In the first decade of the 20th century he created dazzling landscapes of the western mountains that brought him into the avant-garde circle of Alfred Stieglitz and concluded his career by producing roughly rendered paintings of Maine’s landscape, coast, and fisher folk that garnered him fame as the “painter from Maine.” In the interim, he made only brief visits to the state, spending time instead in Europe and other parts of North America. Yet Maine was always with him. As he wrote in his autobiography, “I had remembered my own country—never a time that I haven’t remembered—never a time that it has been ever more to me than when I have been out of it.”

Cassidy’s talk will explore the different ways that Hartley’s Maine was an integral part of his cosmopolitanism, from the influence of international modernism on early paintings like LPL’s Shady Brook to the exhibition of his Maine paysages in Paris in 1925. It will particularly focus on the way that Hartley saw profound connections between Provence, Germany, and Nova Scotia and Maine—his early Maine landscapes, for example, shaping those of southern France. Hartley’s Maine was defined by those locales as well as he took these places with him back to his home state, his Bavarian mountain paintings echoing in his Katahdin works. What we see in Hartley’s Maine is an art that despite its local subject was formed by the travel routes that defined his career. Hartley made Maine not provincial but a place of the world.

Notecards (5″ x 7″) with the Shady Brook image on them are available at the LPL first floor Lending Services Desk for a donation of $2 or $7 for a packet of six cards.

For further information on the March 7 event, contact the LPL Adult/Teen Services Desk at 513-3135 or LPLReference@Gmail.com