Art: Hartley's Figures

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"You are ... right when you say it is bad taste or no taste at all to like some thing herdwise, witness the recent and almost leprous enthusiasm for the dead van Gogh ... I wish you perfect joy in your illustrious solitudes."

The artist who wrote this "to an imaginary friend" in 1936 might have been writing to his solitary self, for enthusiasm has never approached the leprous about Marsden Hartley. A steadfast New England eccentric, whose writings and paintings made sense first to Alfred Stieglitz in 1909, Artist Hartley sits in Maine apainting in the summer and in a Manhattan room ascribbling in the winter, with no public attention what ever. Last week at 61, weathered, heavyset, bright-eyed Marsden Hartley had his 25th one-man show at the Hudson D. Walk er Gallery and made something of a hit.

Cold as the State of Maine and ruggedly lumpy as ever were the Hartley landscapes. But his figures — first he has painted in years—included several strong studies of Nova Scotia fishermen and an extraordinary memory portrait of the late Painter Albert Pinkham Ryder, "as seen at night at the corner of Eighth Avenue and 15th Street" (see cut). Its tonic virtue: that it brought to life without sentiment an imaginative artist whose seclusion and eccentricity delayed until after death his fame as one of the great 19th-Century U. S. painters.