Curatorial Remarks:
Near the end of his life, after spending much of his career in New York, Marsden Hartley attempted to restyle himself as a painter from Maine. He used gulls, crabs, and lobsters in his work as icons of his New England roots. A poet as well as a painter, Hartley was inspired by the tenacity of the people and the ruggedness of the landscape. He belonged to the photographer Alfred Stieglitz’s circle of artists, who sought to create modern art that was spiritually rooted to the American soil.