Face-to-Face: Hart Crane portrait by Marsden Hartley
About the Project
As part of the National Portrait Gallery's education program "Face-to-Face," David C. Ward, historian and co-curator of "Hide/Seek," discusses Marsden Hartley's portrait of Hart Crane titled "Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane." When the great romantic modernist poet Hart Crane committed suicide, artist Marsden Hartley memorialized him by reverting to the style in which he had painted Karl von Freyburg (see Painting No. 47, Berlin in this exhibition). Crane and Hartley had a difficult relationship in which the always fastidious Hartley disparaged Crane's careless ebullience and love for cruising Manhattan's streets. Packed into Eight Bells Folly were references to Crane's age (thirty-three), his life, his death by jumping off a ship, and, above all, his poetry. Over the entire painting looms a blood-tinged sun (Crane died at high noon, or "eight bells") and two arcs symbolizing the subject of Crane's great poem, The Bridge (1930). Put off by Crane, yet fascinated by him, Hartley signaled his ultimate connection to Crane by calling him, in a memorial poem, Hermano-or brother. Recorded at NPG, January 6, 2011. Image: "Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane" / Marsden Hartley / Oil on canvas, 1933 / Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota. Gift of Ione and Hudson D. Walker.1961.4. Face-to-Face talk currently located on the National Portrait Gallery's iTunesU page. ["Eight Bells Folly: Memorial to Hart Crane" by Marsden Hartley. EXH.HS.9]
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