Marsden Hartley: A Gay American Artist In Kaiser's Berlin

[theHandpuppet]

A Gay American Artist In Kaiser's Berlin
In his search for a more accepting society, painter Marsden Hartley settled in pre-WWI Berlin, where he was enchanted by the military pageantry and the love of a German soldier.

He walked in knowing he was beautiful, with his hard gaze and slightly feminine mouth, and I was struck. He had the Marsden Hartley T-shirt and I loved Marsden Hartley. He rode a motorcycle. These commonalities felt like a miracle to me. I realized when he sat down that he had made his T-shirt logo with a pen. It was not silkscreened. He’d simply written marsden hartley. He could’ve written anything and that was what he wrote.

Rachel Kushner, The Flame Throwers

It sounds like the name of a motorcycle company: Marsden Hartley. But Marsden Hartley was a 20th-century painter, slow as oil paint from a brush. An American abstractionist in the early days, at a time when this kind of art was primarily arriving from European painters like Picasso, Cezanne, and Matisse, Hartley was making spontaneous emotional compositions that spoke in bursts and shards of symbol and color. A restless American who rarely lived in one place for more than two years, he knew he was after something different. He left the U.S., seeking a spiritual and metaphysical connection for his work elsewhere.

I was surprised to come across this reference to Hartley in Rachel Kushner’s critically acclaimed novel The Flame Throwers—a story that follows an impressionable twenty-something conceptual artist in 1970s New York whose primary medium of art-making is a motorcycle. 1970s conceptual art was reactionary to modernism—pitted against the romanticism and anti-intellectualism of paint on canvas. Conceptualism exploded the art experience, made it an idea and experience, and something more than purely visual. Yet Reno, Kushner’s main character, admits to loving the art of Marsden Hartley.

Kushner, in an e-mail, said the reference came to her while she was writing. Hartley’s work was introduced to her by the late curator Walter Hopps while they were working together on a “Berlin” issue of Grand Street magazine in the late 1990s, where Hopps was art editor. Hartley left this country for a short stay in Paris and then traveled onto Berlin between 1913 and 1915 on the cusp of World War I, making a series of paintings now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the exhibition Marsden Hartley: The German Paintings 1913–1915....

MORE at http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/08/10/a-gay-american-artist-in-kaiser-s-berlin.html