THIS monograph on Marsden Hartley, written by Elizabeth McCausland, is the first of a number of volumes on contemporary American artists projected by the University of Minnesota. The utter neglect of American art by American art historians and critics that has persisted until very recently is one of the more curious phenomena in the history of art research. The appearance of the general histories of painting by Larkin and Barker and the survey of modern American painting by Baur filled a gap that was probably unique to the United States. Although the last ten years have seen a most remarkable...

MARSDEN HARTLEY’S LIFE made a full circle before its close. At the end the “Maine-iac” — as he called himself — came home to Maine: he had been born January 4, 1877, at Lewiston, and he died September 2, 1943, at Ellsworth. Before his life closed, he passed through the intricacies of post-impressionism, cubism, fauvism, symbolism, and expressionism, only to return to realism, as he returned to his native land. For most of his working years he renounced subject matter–content and asserted that the painting is all, and all-sufficing. Only at the end of his life, when he had...

Dating Hartley’s work is complicated by the fact that the artist seldom signed and dated his paintings on their faces. Notations on the back of some of them may, or may not, have been made contemporaneously with the work. In his later years Hartley worked at times on pictures from the summer or fall of one year to the early spring of the next, when he would exhibit them with a split date. The question is further complicated because Hartley as a man of his time — a time fragmented by aesthetic variety — passed through many styles in a...