“Celebrating the Lewis Collection: Marsden Hartley & Fellow American Modernists" at the Figge Art Museum -- November 14.

Thursday, November 14, 6:30 p.m.

Figge Art Museum, 225 West Second Street, Davenport IA

In a fascinating program held at Davenport's Figge Art Museum on November 14, Celebrating the Lewis Collection: Marsden Hartley & Fellow American Modernists will find Gail R. Scott, director of the Marsden Hartley Legacy Project with Bates College Museum of Art, discussing the pioneering American modernist and the six works by Hartley recently gifted to the Figge by Linda and J. Randolph Lewis.

Born in Lewiston, Maine in 1877, Hartley moved to New York City at age 22 to study painting at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase, and then attended the National Academy of Design. Hartley was a great admirer of Albert Pinkham Ryder, and his friendship with the artist, in addition to the writings of Walt Whitman and American transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, inspired him to view art as a spiritual quest.

From 1900 to 1910, Hartley spent his summers in Lewiston and the region of Western Maine near the village of Lovell. He considered the paintings he produced there—of Kezar Lake, the hillsides, and mountains—his first mature works. These paintings so impressed New York photographer and art promoter Alfred Stieglitz that he agreed on the spot to give Hartley his first solo exhibition at Stieglitz's art gallery 291 in 1909. Hartley continued to exhibit his work at 291 and Stieglitz's other galleries until 1937. Stieglitz also provided Hartley's introduction to European modernist painters, of whom Cézanne, Picasso, Kandinsky, and Matisse would prove the most influential upon him.

Hartley traveled to Europe for the first time in April 1912, and he became acquainted with Gertrude Stein's circle of avant-garde writers and artists in Paris. Stein, along with Hart Crane and Sherwood Anderson, encouraged Hartley to write as well as paint. In April 1913, Hartley relocated to Berlin, the capital of the German Empire where he continued to paint, and became friends with the painters Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. His work during this period was a combination of abstraction and German Expressionism, fueled by his personal brand of mysticism. Many of Hartley's Berlin paintings were further inspired by the German military pageantry then on display, though his view of this subject changed after the outbreak of World War I, once war was no longer "a romantic but a real reality."

Celebrating the Lewis Collection: Marsden Hartley & Fellow American Modernists will be presented in Davenport on November 14, with the Figge bar open at 5 p.m. and the program beginning at 6:30 p.m. Admission is free, and more information is available by calling (563)326-7804 and visiting FiggeArtMuseum.org.

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