Marsden Hartley: The Biography of an American Artist

"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