This exhibition draws together the work of two major artists from opposite ends of the twentieth century. Organized by the Weisman Art Museum, the exhibition opens on Friday, April 14, and runs through June 18, 1995. The exhibition will tour to Chicago's Terra Museum of American Art and to the Florida International University Art Museum in the following Summer and Fall.
After an absence of nearly three decades, artist Robert Indiana will travel to Minneapolis to attend a special exhibition preview and reception on Thursday, April 13. On the next day, the official opening of the exhibition, the artist will meet with a group of University art students.
Marsden Hartley is a key member of America's first avant-garde. His German paintings, work from his residence in Berlin from 1913 to 1915, are considered the finest of his career and landmarks in American art history. Robert Indiana, one of the primary pop artists of the 1960s, has just completed a new series of 18 paintings that pay homage to Hartley. This exhibition unites the two sets of related paintings - Hartley's German War Motifs and Indiana's Hartley elegies - for the first time.
The title of the exhibition comes from a letter Hartley wrote in 1913. He explained that everything that he did sprang from direct, personal experience - that it was "...dictated by life itself." The artist recorded his personal experience in Berlin through the German paintings, in an abstract and expressionist style.
Similarly, Robert Indiana's work in this exhibition is a very personal record "dictated" by his life. Indiana created the idea for his new series because his home on Vinalhaven island in Maine is near a house Hartley once occupied. Indiana, who feels a strong affiliation with Hartley, combines references to his own life history with those of Hartley's in canvases that paraphrase Hartley's German Paintings.
In both sets of paintings, Hartley and Indiana also strive to express their identities as homosexual men through indirect and personal codes. For example, Hartley's paintings reference an international scandal regarding gays in the military in Imperial Germany. The ways that the two artists confront and conceal an intimate side of themselves is an important subject for the exhibition.
The exhibition curator Patricia McDonnell noted,
"In his German paintings, Hartley distilled the syntax of imperial Berlin - the spectacle of its vital urban pace, raucous night life, and courtly trappings - and inventied a pictorial language that matched its disjointed frenzy. Indiana has embraced Hartley, the artist from Maine, in his own move to Maine. In paintings that pay Hartley tribute, Indiana weaves in personal references. The results are works that speak about the art and life circumstances of Hartley and Indiana simultaneously."
The Weisman Art Museum holds the world's largest collection of works by Marsden Hartley, most of which come from a bequest by the museum's first director, Hudson Walker. Walker, who headed a gallery in New York City from 1936 to 1940, became Hartley's dealer when he left dealer and photographer Alfred Steiglitz, who was also artist Georgia O'Keeffe's husband. Walker provided Hartley personal and financial support in the later years of the artist's life and promoted Hartley scholarship after the artist's death in 1946.
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