Word: hartley
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Witty, often trenchant, Hartley rarely lacked for friends and even patrons, though support was often meager. He was always in financial uncertainty, living in countless borrowed houses, or as somebody's guest. As late as 1934, when he was 57, he had to destroy more than 100 paintings and drawings to save money on storage space...
...National Academy of Design and spent the summers in Maine. Slowly he evolved a style of his own, ignoring conventional perspective, relying heavily on expressive brush strokes. The neoimpressionist result was what Haskell calls "a degree of gestural abstraction that would not be surpassed in America until abstract expressionism." Hartley called these works "little visions of the great intangible . . . Some will say he's gone mad-others will look and say he's looked in at the lattices of Heaven and come back with the madness of splendor...
...august dealer-photographer Alfred Stieglitz gave Hartley his first one-man show at his famed 291 [Fifth Avenue] Gallery. To his delight. Hartley suddenly found himself immersed in the Stieglitz circle. But his most emotional experience was his discovery of Albert Pinkham Ryder. "I was a convert to the field of imagination into which I was born," he wrote. "I had been thrown back into the body and being of my own country...
Under the spell of Ryder, whom he sought out in his downtown studio. Hartley turned out the massively authoritative series known as the "Dark Landscapes...
Stieglitz arranged to send Hartley abroad in 1912. With such sponsorship, Hartley found himself welcomed into the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein and its animated talk of abstraction, of analytical cubism, of form vs, content. Soon Hartley was painting variants of Picasso, Braque, Delaunay, Cezanne and most of all of Kandinsky. He called his new style "subliminal or cosmic cubism...