Amazon.com: Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism (Georgia Okeeffe Museum) (9780300121490): Heather Hole, Director Barbara Buhler Lynes: Books
Publication Date: December 28, 2007 | Series: Georgia Okeeffe Museum
Considered to be among the greatest early American modernists, the painter Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) traveled the United States and Europe in his search for a distinctive American aesthetic. His stay in New Mexico resulted in an extraordinary series of landscape paintings—created in New Mexico, New York, and Europe between 1918 and 1924—that show an evolution in style and thinking that is important for understanding both Hartley’s oeuvre and American modernism in the postwar years.
Marsden Hartley and the West examines this pivotal stage of the painter’s career, drawing upon his writings and providing illustrations of rarely seen and previously unpublished works. The author considers Hartley’s involvement with the Stieglitz circle and its “soil-and-spirit” philosophy, the Taos art colony, New York Dada, and the impact of historical events such as World War I. Within this setting she analyzes the pastels and oil paintings that suggest Hartley’s increasingly ambivalent response to the land. Beginning with optimistic, naturalistic views, the New Mexico works grew progressively darker and more tumultuous, increasingly reflecting a sense of loss brought on by war. The paintings become a site where the landscapes of memory, self, and nation merge, while reflecting broader modernist debates about “American-ness” and a usable past.
Heather Hole is assistant curator at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Barbara Buhler Lynes is curator at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and the Emily Fisher Landau Director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center. Her books include Georgia O’Keeffe and the Calla Lily in American Art, 1860–1940 and Georgia O’Keeffe: Catalogue Raisonné, both published by Yale University Press.
Product Details
Hardcover: 208 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press (December 28, 2007)
This review is from: Marsden Hartley and the West: The Search for an American Modernism (Georgia Okeeffe Museum) (Hardcover)
This book was a big disappointment to me. It is overflowing with information, but ultimately it is much less than the sum of its parts. While there is a rough overall chronological organization to the presentation of material, the few structural themes repeatedly appear and disappear with wide gaps between, which makes following the thread of thought very difficult. There are also frequent and overly lengthy digressions onto themes of at best peripheral relationship to the main subject.
In the end, the impression I am left with is a working draft of a college thesis written by a student who has a lot to learn about how to make a cohesive and effective presentation, and who has put a lot of effort into padding out the material in order to reach a required length. The book would have been greatly improved if reduced to about a third of its present length, though even that would have been much longer than needed to present the very limited amount of useful interpretation and analysis to be found wandering about within.
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