{"id":20611,"date":"2010-02-25T12:07:03","date_gmt":"2010-02-25T17:07:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/home.bates.edu\/?p=20611"},"modified":"2017-02-22T17:21:27","modified_gmt":"2017-02-22T22:21:27","slug":"neh-hartley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2010\/02\/25\/neh-hartley\/","title":{"rendered":"NEH grant supports preservation of Hartley materials at museum"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Bates College receives NEH grant for Hartley collection\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/9732032?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write\"><\/iframe><br \/>\nThe Bates College Museum of Art has received a $6,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the preservation of the college&#8217;s Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection, an assortment of artworks, personal effects and other materials relating to the Maine native and pioneering American modernist painter.<\/p>\n<p>The NEH Preservation Assistance Grant will enable the museum to obtain expert assessments of how best to preserve the collection, which came to the museum in the 1950s.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Hartley was born in Lewiston in 1877. About a century ago he joined a circle of artists, including Georgia O&#8217;Keeffe and John Marin, who were represented by the renowned photographer and art dealer Alfred Stieglitz. By bringing a distinctively American energy and outlook to cutting-edge European trends in art, they established an American modernist school that remains tremendously popular and influential.<a href='https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2010\/02\/hartley_photo5.jpg'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"221\" height=\"300\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2010\/02\/hartley_photo5-221x300.jpg\" class=\"attachment-medium alignright\" alt=\"Marsden Hartley\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>At Bates, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/x66632.xml\">Hartley materials<\/a> compose one of the museum&#8217;s two founding collections, and they continue to inform its approach to acquiring and exhibiting artwork, and to educational programming. The grant, explains museum curator Bill Low, enables the museum to &#8220;get a simple, comprehensive assessment of the collection done. We can then use that as a springboard to other treatment grants and larger support.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Representing a Lewiston native and artist of international renown, the Hartley collection is a valuable Bates asset. &#8220;Like the other collections here, it&#8217;s an important teaching tool,&#8221; Low says. In addition, &#8220;it has really served as a foundation for the other collecting that we do.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Though living elsewhere for most of his life, Hartley often visited Maine in the summer and settled in the Down East village of Corea a few years before he died, in 1943. Though he spent little time in Lewiston as an adult, he &#8220;wrote and spoke very nostalgically about his hometown,&#8221; says Low, &#8220;particularly later in his life when he really wanted to dedicate himself to becoming the painter of Maine.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;He wrote quite beautifully about his love for the Androscoggin River and the people here, and being a young man here.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>In his lifetime, the artist expressed a desire that there be a memorial collection of some sort in Lewiston after his death. In 1951, the heirs of the Hartley estate gave Bates personal effects from Hartley&#8217;s home in Corea, including drawings by other artists in the Stieglitz circle. In 1955, his niece, Norma Berger, made an additional gift that included 99 Hartley drawings.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The Hartley drawings cover a wide range of subjects and constitute the largest collection his work in this medium,&#8221; says Low. &#8220;They document his travels and some also serve as studies for some of his significant paintings. <a href='https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2010\/02\/web-hartley_drwg1.jpg'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"215\" height=\"300\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2010\/02\/web-hartley_drwg1-215x300.jpg\" class=\"attachment-medium alignright\" alt=\"Marsden Hartley&#039;s\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;As a result this collection is frequently sought out by scholars as part of the research into Hartley&#8217;s practice. The collection has been included in important exhibitions over the years.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Overall, Low explains, the collection is &#8220;quite broad.&#8221; It includes textiles that Hartley collected, correspondence, poems and essays, jewelry, and a camera, as well as Hartley&#8217;s personal library and a large holding of his writings, which reside in the <a href=\"http:\/\/abacus.bates.edu\/muskie-archives\/EADFindingAids\/MC011.html\">Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library<\/a> at Bates.<\/p>\n<p>The grant is part of a special NEH initiative, the &#8220;We the People&#8221; program. It is designed to encourage and strengthen the teaching, study and understanding of American history and culture. &#8220;It&#8217;s a valuable recognition of the significance of this project,&#8221; Low says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Bates College Museum of Art has received a $6,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to support the preservation of the college&#8217;s Marsden Hartley Memorial Collection, an assortment of artworks, personal effects and other materials relating to the Maine native and pioneering American modernist painter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":148,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[11010],"tags":[1363,1664,5686,6135,6618,10834],"class_list":["post-20611","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts","tag-bates-college-museum-of-art","tag-bill-low","tag-marsden-hartley","tag-music-tag","tag-olin-arts","tag-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20611","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/148"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20611"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":88135,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20611\/revisions\/88135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}