On View
Not on viewObject number1968/9.5
Bavarian Landscape
Artist
Marsden Hartley
(American, 1877-1943)
Date1933
Mediumcrayon on paper
Dimensionsframe: 21 × 22 × 5/8 in. (53.3 × 55.9 × 1.6 cm)
sheet: 12 5/8 × 16 in. (32.1 × 40.6 cm)
sheet: 12 5/8 × 16 in. (32.1 × 40.6 cm)
Credit LineDirector's Fund
Exhibition HistoryUnknown exhibition, University of Southern California, Los Angeles (Nov. 20 - Dec. 26, 1968); Tuscon Art Center (Jan. 10 - Feb. 16, 1969); University of Texas University Art Museum, Austin (Mar. 10 - Apr. 27, 1969).
"Marsden Hartley in Bavaria," Emerson Gallery, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY (Sept. 1989 - June 1990).
"The Landscape in Michigan and Indiana Collections," Krasl Art Center (Nov. 20 - Dec. 31, 1993).
"Highlights from the Permanent Collection: Prints and Drawings," KIA (Sept. 15 - Nov. 25, 2001).
"Masterworks on Paper," KIA Long Gallery (Sept. 2005 - Jan. 2006).
"Highlight from the Permanent Collection," Fall 2006.
"Master Drawings from the Permanent Collection," KIA Long Gallery (Nov. 18, 2006 - Feb. 4, 2007).
"American Perspectives: Modernism from the Collection," KIA Long Gallery (Apr. 25 - Aug. 30, 2009).
Label TextBorn in 1877 in Maine, Hartley’s career was defined by his frequent travels to places including New York, Maine, Massachusetts, Nova Scotia, France, Germany, Mexico, and Bermuda. As suggested by his habit of moving from place to place, he was an intense, restless man, and his peripatetic lifestyle provided him with fresh stimuli and sources of inspiration for his work.
While in Paris and Germany in 1913, Hartley created works that reflected the influence of European modernists with their strong, heavily outlined abstracted forms in a Cubist style. It was during this period that Hartley created the "German officer" paintings for which he is perhaps best known. Hartley loved Germany and visited again in 1927.
In 1932, he was battling a crisis of confidence and went to Mexico to paint the Mexican landscape and people. Unable to immerse himself in his work, and distressed at the news of the suicide of his friend, the poet Hart Crane, he returned to Germany in September 1933. He settled for four months in the village of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps, in the Wetterstein Range.
Hartley took long hikes through the region, creating 15 paintings and several drawings of the mountains, including the quiet, Cubism-tinged Bavarian Landscape. Hartley wrote that during this time he was able to gain sustenance from the landscape by placing himself "next to rocks and earth again." In February of 1934 he left Europe, never to return, but his brief stay in the Alps was restorative.
Hartley’s time in Germany likely also played a role in his interest in Aryanism and eugenics in the 1930s and ‘40s. This interest significantly informed his late-career works in Eastern Canada and Maine, where he died in 1943.
