Word: hartleys
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Friedberg's solution was immediately hailed as a "wonderful achievement" by three professors. Hartley Rogers, lecturer at M.I.T., and Friedberg's former tutor, described the problem as "one of the most important problems of the last ten years...
...and/or abstraction. But their similarity stops right there. Seeing the contrasts in their art, few would take them for countrymen, let alone contemporaries. Tobey's Transit, for example, relates to no objective visual experience at all, unless it be that of images swimming in the tight-shut eye. Hartley's German Officer deals with a mood, not a visual image. Davis' Eggbeater beats the eggbeater into unrecognizable shape. Hofmann's Red Trickle celebrates an activity rather than a perception. Dove's Abstraction is a generalization of nature, flat yet elusive. Feininger's Gelmeroda multiplies...
...Marsden Hartley (1877-1943) liked to call himself "the painter from Maine." But he traveled considerably in Europe, appraised its art with a shrewd Yankee eye. Hartley was the first American to grasp the power of German expressionism, immediately adapted the experiments of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc to his own ends. His German Officer (opposite) is as tumultuous as anything painted before World War II, though not so bold as today's abstract expressionism...
Curiously enough, Hartley came to renounce expressionist painting. "Underlying all sensible works of art," he wrote in 1928, "there must be somewhere in evidence the particular problem understood. I would rather be sure that I had placed two colors in true relationship to each other than to have exposed a wealth of emotionalism gone wrong in the name of richness of personal expression." Hartley's chief fame now rests on the cool, blunt, composed, deliberate Maine landscapes that occupied his last years...
...trouble was not in such modern old masters as Max Weber, the late Lyonel Feininger (see MILESTONES) and Marsden Hartley, who to British eyes were only American reflections of European trends. And in Edward Hopper's lonely city scenes and George Bellows' Dempsey and Firpo, the Sunday Times found "the real rude stuff of native American art." The pained cries of angry outrage were provoked by the abstract expressionists...