TACOMA, WA.- Tacoma Art Museum will ring in 2005 with a distinctive display of works by Marsden Hartley, one of the most important artists from the American early modern period. The nationally-traveling exhibition Marsden Hartley: American Modern opens Saturday, January 15, 2005, and is organized by the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. The exhibition is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes has called Hartley “the most brilliantly gifted of the early generation of American modernists.” Hartley was a leading figure in the circle of artists and writers surrounding Alfred Stieglitz in the early decades of the twentieth-century in New York. Arthur Dove, John Marin, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Paul Strand were other core artists of this circle and Hartley’s peers. Hartley’s vivid hues, muscular paint handling, and pioneering modernism led the Pulitzer-prize-winning novelist John Updike to praise Hartley’s “boldness, jubilance, freshness, and élan,” qualities Northwest audiences can appreciate in this rare showing.

Multiple books, exhibitions, and reviews devoted to the artist have surfaced in the past twenty-five years, yet the last Hartley exhibition shown in the Pacific Northwest took place over twenty years ago. Northwest audiences now have the opportunity to get a comprehensive look at Hartley’s career and observe many of his strongest works, which were drawn from the artist’s own estate at the Weisman Art Museum.

“This retrospective exhibition presents superb examples of Hartley's work from each chapter of his career,” noted Tacoma Art Museum Chief Curator Patricia McDonnell, who originally curated the exhibition and authored the accompanying catalogue. “As a committed Hartley scholar, it is rewarding to watch the increasing attention and praise this extraordinary artist attracts.”

Marsden Hartley: American Modern presents thirty-seven paintings and sixteen works on paper, along with portrait photographs and sculptural busts. Early post-impressionist mountain scenes, pre-WWI abstractions completed in Paris and Berlin, Provincetown experiments, Maine and New Mexican landscapes, still-life paintings from the 1920s and 1930s, Bavarian mountain pastels, and archaic 1930s portraits are examples of works included in the exhibition.

Painter, poet, and critic Marsden Hartley saw momentous political, social, and cultural changes during his lifetime (1877 – 1943). Hartley’s attitudes and artistic approach also shifted throughout his career, falling in line with the dynamic nature of the times. The exhibition catalogue, Marsden Hartley: American Modern, traces the evolution of this significant modern painter. In the catalogue, McDonnell analyzes Hartley’s shifting artistic practice and beliefs in the context of the cultural and political realities that deeply affected the man and his times.