Maglaras states directly that Hartley’s work is about death and transcendence, and the whole of the film is organized around his arguments for this reading. It’s not inaccurate, but it seems limiting. Certainly Hartley had grievous losses in his life, including his German officer and the young men of the Mason fishing family in Canada. He also stuck to his identity as an artist in the face of daunting difficulties, never making much money until the last few years of his life.
But Maglaras’s Hartley is not the same as mine. There’s a sense of portentous doom it the movie, the arc of a life lived as epic tragedy transcended by the sublime nature of the work. It seems to me that Maglaras asks too much from Hartley, more than he needs to.
There’s a Hartley painting I go to see whenever I have the time and am in the neighborhood of the Colby museum. It’s a painting of a church that still exists in Head Tide, Maine, just as he painted it. It reminds me that Harley lived his life for the simple joy of art done really well, one day to the next. Wherever you can find a Hartley that same feeling is there, and it is more than enough.
Ken Greenleaf can be reached at ken.greenleaf@gmail.com.
Related:
Half-century, Expanded within, More than words, More 
- Half-century
The big 50th-anniversary exhibition at the Colby College Museum of Art has only about a month left of its eight-month run, so it seems like a good time to revisit this sprawling and worthwhile show.
- Expanded within
On the inside, though, it feels like a much larger museum has been magically folded into the fine old neo-classical structure.
- More than words
What are we to make of Robert Indiana? His is generally considered part of the Pop art group of artists who came into prominence in the late '60s, along with Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, and Roy Lichtenstein, and though he is not perhaps as highly regarded in the art world, he has a wider popular following than any of them.
- SPACE to screen video banned from Smithsonian
A video banned from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery last week in the wake of threats from conservative politicians will be on view in the front window of SPACE Gallery (538 Congress St., Portland) this week and next, as part of a nationwide show of solidarity between art galleries and the organizers of the Smithsonian's show.
- Review: ''Remember the Ladies'' at the Newport Art Museum
Rhode Island is one of the preeminent places for art-making in America, thanks in great part to the Rhode Island School of Design, but what would it be without its pioneering women?
- Maxey’s sprawling landscapes; Blackburn’s altered spaces
After years of visiting her second home in her husband's native United Kingdom, Providence artist Madolin Maxey says it finally occurred to her to paint the hedgerows, rolling hills, giant boulders, and ancient stone crosses in Devon in southwestern England, where their house overlooks the River Dart as it winds northwest from the English Channel.
- Hartley’s Gloucester; plus, Cristi Rinklin
Marsden Hartley returned to Gloucester in 1931 like so many traditional painters making the summer pilgrimage to the city's shores and fishing wharves, except he was part of Alfred Stieglitz's Modernist circle in New York, had imbibed French Cubism in Paris and German Expressionism in Berlin, and was a friend of Gertrude Stein and Wassily Kandinsky.
- SLIDESHOW: ''Marsden Hartley: Soliloquy in Dogtown'' + Cristi Rinklin's ''Diluvial''
''Marsden Hartley: Soliloquy in Dogtown'' is at the Cape Ann Museum through October 14. Cristi Rinklin's ''Diluvial'' is at the Currier Museum of Art through September 9.
- Left out- side
- Kitchen-sink ‘Summer’
You wouldn’t think a painting exhibit of ships and still lifes, landscapes and portraits, primitives and abstractions representing 82 artists and spanning 148 years would hold together in any discernible way.
- Exhibition expedition
Here are 10 exhibits across New England that will keep you happily inside all summer. Summer Guide 2006: Cheap thrills from Bar Harbor to New Haven.
- Less
Topics:
Museum And Gallery
, Painting, Visual Arts, Gertrude Stein, More
, Painting, Visual Arts, Gertrude Stein, University of Southern Maine, University of Southern Maine, Paul Cezanne, Marsden Hartley, Marsden Hartley, Marsden Hartley, Ken Greenleaf, Less
