Marsden Hartley

"A penetrating biography.... Ludington offers a psychological portrait of an intense, contradictory, scornful, but gentle man who transcended his nineteenth-century roots in Lewiston, Maine, to view Europe as his home and to make a distinctive contribution to modernism."—Kirkus Reviews"Drawing on Hartley's letters and other writings as well as on the correspondence and reminiscences of the artist's friends, Ludington traces the restless career of the painter.... [Hartley] had troubled friendships with some of the most important artists and writers of his day—Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Fairfield Porter, Eugene O'Neill, Georgia O'Keeffe, and others. His relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, who supported him financially and exhibited his work,... runs like a leitmotif through the book, and indicates Hartley's character—demanding, touchy, often ungrateful but also compelling.... This frank and unsentimental account of a life of contradictions and paradoxes returns one to the artist's paintings with a fresh eye."—Publishers Weekly"Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) had a virtually unique role as a modernist painter. He was notable not only for his powerful canvases but for his poetry and essays. Townsend Ludington's astute portrait of the artist focuses upon his cosmopolitan sensibility in a generation melding modern art with an American tradition of mystical idealism.... Ludington views Hartley as an essential American artist embarked on a spiritual odyssey."—Robert Taylor, Boston Globe

"A penetrating biography.... Ludington offers a psychological portrait of an intense, contradictory, scornful, but gentle man who transcended his nineteenth-century roots in Lewiston, Maine, to view Europe as his home and to make a distinctive contribution to modernism.", "Drawing on Hartley's letters and other writings as well as on the correspondence and reminiscences of the artist's friends, Ludington traces the restless career of the painter.... Hartley had troubled friendships with some of the most important artists and writers of his day—Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Fairfield Porter, Eugene O'Neill, Georgia O'Keeffe, and others. His relationship with Alfred Stieglitz, who supported him financially and exhibited his work,... runs like a leitmotif through the book, and indicates Hartley's character—demanding, touchy, often ungrateful but also compelling.... This frank and unsentimental account of a life of contradictions and paradoxes returns one to the artist's paintings with a fresh eye.", "Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) had a virtually unique role as a modernist painter. He was notable not only for his powerful canvases but for his poetry and essays. Townsend Ludington's astute portrait of the artist focuses upon his cosmopolitan sensibility in a generation melding modern art with an American tradition of mystical idealism.... Ludington views Hartley as an essential American artist embarked on a spiritual odyssey."

Townsend Ludington holds the Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professorship of English and American Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. His previous books include Seeking the Spiritual: The Paintings of Marsden Hartley, also from Cornell.