Marsden Hartley

by Townsend Ludington

Townsend Ludington's probing, insightful biography of Marsden Hartley is the first full-scale work on the life of one of the great American painters of our century. Two weeks after Hartley's death, in 1943, Paul Rosenberg wrote in the Nation that Hartley was an "almost gigantic secondary artist." Now, as time affords us greater perspective on that eruptive period in American art, the first half of the twentieth century, we can see that Hartley was in fact an artist of primary, not secondary, importance. His career encompassed an abundance of phases and fascinations, all of them reflecting his abiding interest in newness and his never-ending quest for his own truth and roots. As Ludington reveals here, Marsden Hartley was a man of many parts: introverted, homosexual, given to great highs and mordant lows, maligned, neglected, and sometimes praised. He was a fine technician, a restless innovator, an intellectual who could theorize brilliantly, yet whose best art often went counter to his