Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1914 (Heft 45))

It will not do to set these pictures of Mr. Hartley’s down as insanity or fakery. They
are not fakery, because Mr. Hartley is a sincere man. And the trouble about calling them
insanity is that so many other people are being insane nowadays in similar ways that it may
possibly turn out that after all they are perfectly sane, and all the rest of us insane.
Charles H. Caffin in the New York American:
An exhibition of paintings by Marsden Hartley, interpreting, as he says, his “experiences,”
is being held at the Little Gallery of the Photo-Secession.
Forewords to the exhibition are supplied by the painter himself, by Mrs. Mabel Dodge
and by Miss Gertrude Stein. They are oracular in tone and quite portentously solemn, sum-
moning us into the presence of a series of creations which are to be seen and felt in silence. For
“Of what use,” says Mrs. Dodge, “to write down the appreciation of one person, in one par-
ticular code, one personal interpretation, of Marsden Hartley’s pictures?”
I venture, however, to ignore this warning to keep my mouth shut. It happens to be
my lot to record the impressions I receive from what artists are doing; and, while it is often a
thankless one, and at best “a poor thing, but mine own,” I must brace myself to the perform-
ance of the job.
Hartley used to paint mountain scenes, or, rather, the moods with which they impressed
him. Now, mountains may impress a man in either of two ways—they may uplift his imagina-
tion or they may bear down upon it. It seems they affected Hartley in the latter way. He felt
their menace; they imprisoned him; his spirit longed to be liberated. They bore down upon his
spirit and shut it in, I suspect, like the conventions of Puritan tradition that he had
inherited.
At length the opportunity came to get away and live in Paris and then in Berlin, and
the process of spiritual liberation commenced, the stages of which, so far as it has gone, are
represented in these paintings. In Paris he seems to have been more or less lost; in Berlin
he found himself.
Now, Hartley’s is not the first instance I have known of a finely sensitive and serious New
England spirit chafing in its inherited shackles. “If you bar the door,” says the poet, speaking
of love, “it will in at the window.” With the spirit it is the reverse: barred in, it will out at the
window. The more compressed it has been, the more violent is apt to be its exit or explosion.
For the latter simile, I imagine, is more applicable to Hartley’s case. The accumulated
heat and force engendered by generations of suppression of the free love of beauty in life and art
may assume the conditions of a dormant volcano. In time it seethes to the surface and finally
erupts. This, if I mistake not, roughly suggests Hartley’s emotional experience.
Among the paintings is a Paris impression. An explosion has occurred; there is a spread
of rocket-like rods, bursting at their tops into flaming stars. It is the volcano’s preliminary
splutter. Then—to preserve my simile—vapors begin to arise. In the freedom of air and light
they take on convolutions of pattern and brighter and brighter colors; they take shape and
suggestions of Kwannons, triune circles and other Catholic or Rosicrucian symbols. They are
the vapors from the bowels of a mediaeval world.
Then gradually the hot cone of the volcano releases itself in a flow of molten lava. It
hisses round the jagged excrescences of the crater’s lip and forms in a slowly coiling stream.
Only here we have to imagine the crater inverted. The lava zigzags and pours upward. But
it seems to be an eruption neither of intellectual nor spiritual experience; it is, as I see it and
feel it, a boiling up to the surface of accumulated impressions that are solely those of sensuous
emotion.
Under them the artist staggers and is confused. Gradually, however, that very impression
of systematization which galls him in Berlin reacts upon him to his benefit. Out of the system-
atization he gathers consciousness of the value of organization. His latest work, while still
suggestive of turbulent emotions, is more organic in arrangement.
The whole is a strangely interesting exposure of the throes of a soul in labor, and leaves
one wondering what will be the ultimate result of parturition.

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