John Marin, Marsden Hartley, and Art History's Whiteness Studies Problem

This paper compares the historiographical treatment of race in the Maine oeuvres of John Marin and Marsden Hartley, and thereby illuminates some of the ongoing blind spots relating to scholarship on white U.S. artists. Although Marin’s Maine work has never been substantially tied to issues of race, I assert that, like others of his social milieu, Marin’s conceptions of the state idealized the whiteness of its “native folk” and their ostensible spiritual and physical connection to its lands and seas. The body of writing about Marin therefore speaks to a major blind spot within art history today – a lack of awareness of how the racial identities of white artists affected their artmaking, particularly when representing other white people. The recent reinterpretation of Hartley’s work in terms of its white-supremacist content offers a contrasting but related set of insights. While recent writings on Hartley have made clear the extent to which his late-career Maine pictures manifested a white-supremacist exaltation of the “Yankee folk”, the major 2017 exhibition "Marsden Hartley’s Maine" only passingly referred to the topic. On one hand, Hartley and Marin’s differing historiographical fortunes suggest that we are currently unlikely to recognize forms of racial thinking that seem quotidian rather than extreme. However, the ongoing inattention towards the racial content of both artists’ work is a reminder of the challenges which critical race art history still faces, including the difficulties inherent in working to alter canonical narratives or producing knowledge in museum contexts.