I kept trying to remember the precise wording of something I’d read by Marsden Hartley, as I walked through The Met Breuer, savoring “Marsden Hartley’s Maine.”1 I recalled that the essay was titled “Art and the Personal Life,” and I thought it included something about Hartley’s calling himself an “intellectual experimentalist.” Back home, I looked through my copy of the artist’s collected writings and found the passage that had been haunting me: “I can hardly bear the sound of the words ‘expressionism,’ ‘emotionalism,’ ‘personality,’ and such, because they imply the wish to express personal life, and I prefer to have no personal life,” Hartley wrote in 1928. “ . . . I have come to the conclusion that it is better to have two colors in right relation to each other than to have a vast confusion of emotional exuberance in the guise of ecstatic fullness or poetical revelation.”

This declaration had come to mind not because of, but, rather, in spite of the well-chosen survey of the peripatetic artist’s works made in and/or about the New England state where he was born in 1877, lived until the age of sixteen, visited often, and returned to, more or less permanently, for his last six years, until his death in 1943. Far from announcing Hartley’s expressed desire to be a maker of dispassionate, rigorous pictures that revealed nothing about the artist himself, just about every work in the show loudly contradicted the idea. From the earliest landscapes of