Adventures in the Arts
Painter Marsden Hartley gathered these informal chapters in 1921, and they read less like formal criticism than like an artist thinking aloud about what moves him. He writes on Cézanne, Winslow Homer, Albert Pinkham Ryder, and Odilon Redon, then turns with equal seriousness to vaudeville acrobats, the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, and the aesthetic traditions of Native American life. Several of the pieces first appeared in journals such as The Dial, The Seven Arts, and The Nation, and the collection opens with an introduction by the critic Waldo Frank. What binds it together is Hartley’s conviction that fine painting and popular performance draw on the same current of feeling. Read today it offers a first-hand view of American modernism from one of its participants, argued with more warmth than system.
